It was declared as the year of democracy. With more than one and a half billion votes cast in elections in 73 countries, 2024 offered a rare opportunity to take the social and political temperature of almost half the world’s population.
The results are already in, and they have given a punitive decision to public office holders.
The leader in every one of the 12 developed Western countries holding national elections in 2024 lost their share of the vote at the polls, the first time that has ever happened in almost 120 years of modern democracy. In Asia, even the hegemonic governments of India and Japan were not spared the stench.
In power or otherwise, centrists were often the losers, as voters fell for radical parties on either side. The populist right in particular surged forward, fueled in significant part by a rightward shift among young people.
The results paint a picture of an angry electorate battered by record inflation, fed up with economic stagnation, troubled by rising immigration and increasingly disillusioned with the system as a whole.
In a sense, the year of democracy produced a cry that democracy is no longer working, with the younger generation, many of whom voted for the first time, delivering some of the strongest rebukes against the establishment.
Average across the developed worldthe incumbents’ vote share fell by seven percentage points in 2024, an all-time record and more than double the decline as the electorate punished elected officials in the wake of the global financial crisis.
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The range of countries producing similar results points to a common undercurrent, with inflation the obvious culprit.
Coming into 2024, high and rising prices were the main concern of the public in the vast majority of countries going to the polls. While recessions are deeply unpopular, their impacts are unevenly distributed. Inflation hurts everyone.
But if the cost-of-living crisis acted as a deterrent for incumbents, a closer look at different countries and regions shows that it was far from the only driver of discontent.
The biggest backlash against a sitting government came in Britain, where the Tories’ charge sheet included not just high prices but a corruption scandal, a crisis in public health care delivery, a self-inflicted economic shock and a rise sharp immigration.
Across the channel in France, President Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to fend off the populist right by calling early legislative elections failed. The resulting political chaos is still not fully resolved months later.
In India, Narendra Modi’s formidable Bharatiya Janata Party secured a narrow victory but lost its parliamentary majority, struggling to stem the tide of discontent over the growing disconnect between strong economic growth and weak nation-building. work.
This was particularly pronounced among young people, whose unemployment rate rose to almost 50 percent before the election, according to data from the Center for Monitoring the Indian Economy.
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Even the exceptions to the anti-incumbency wave are less anomalous when considered in the context of other central themes of political change of the year.
In Mexico and Indonesia, respectively, Claudia Sheinbaum and Prabowo Subianto each improved on the incumbent president’s margin. In both cases, they ran extensive campaigns promising continuity with their anti-elitist predecessors, illustrating the near-universal success of populists over the past twelve months. Prabowo also relied heavily on dominating the new social media landscape, another common theme.
Seen around the world as a whole, the poor performance of centrist parties and the march of populists, especially from the right, was as strong a theme as the anti-establishment tide, perhaps stronger.
The victory of the Labor Party in Britain is no exception here, as it won this year with fewer votes than in the previous two elections it lost. And just months after a landslide victory, opinion has turned sharply against the party and the leader.
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The French public’s anger at Macron and his centrist party, meanwhile, reflects a broader global mood of disillusionment with the political establishment and a sense that elected officials either don’t know or don’t care what ordinary people think.
Although it ultimately fell short of its hopes, the 15-point margin achieved by France’s National Assembly in the parliamentary election was the largest recorded by any party in any developed country this year. The second, third and fourth biggest gains of the year were all by right-wing populists in the form of Austria’s Freedom party, Britain’s Reform and Portugal’s Chega.
This speaks to the fact that immigration has been a growing concern across the developed world in recent years and was one of the top issues on voters’ minds as they went to the polls.
Where conservative parties lost ground, it was generally the parties that edged them to the right that were the main beneficiaries. The success of Nigel Farage’s UK Reform in removing Tory voters in Britain has been widely attributed to the latter’s failure to deliver on its promise to reduce immigration.
But the anti-establishment successes were not limited to the right. The UK Greens were one of the few radical left parties to also gain ground as voters disillusioned with a stagnant center broke in both directions.
While the timing and size of the anti-incumbency wave largely point to the short-term shock of higher prices, the populist surge looks more like the continuation—or perhaps the acceleration—of a trend that has emerged in a growing number of countries. at least over two decades.
A prominent theory for why we’re seeing this unfolded in an influential paper published earlier this year by a team of Harvard economists, who found that people growing up against a background of weaker economic growth and less progress between generations are more. they are likely to see the world as zero-sum, where one person’s gain must come at someone else’s cost.
The continued decline of upward economic mobility in rich countries may thus explain much of the rise in these views, which tend to be associated with support for parties and politicians on both the left and the right who promise destroy the existing system or defend against external threats.
Another possibility is that dramatic changes in the media landscape over the past two decades have played a role in eroding previously longstanding norms against populist rhetoric and talking points. The emergence of social media has made it easier for political outsiders to speak directly to the public, leveling a playing field that was previously skewed toward established figures and parties.
Under the surface From the headline results, one of the most striking patterns seen from country to country has been the rise in support for the populist right among young people.
In Britain, support for Reform is now higher among men in their late teens and early twenties than among those in their thirties, and a marked gender gap has opened up among younger voters. A very similar pattern can be seen in the US, where young people also turned hard towards Donald Trump in November, and the same pattern appears in much of Europe.
Notably, there seems to be plenty of room for this trend to continue: the share saying they would consider voting for the radical right is even higher than they already have.
Such a marked difference is surprising, but it is not without plausible explanation. If discontent with economic stagnation drives zero-sum attitudes, few groups have experienced such a decline as young people, whose socio-economic status has been steadily declining across the West.
But it is not only young people who move to extremes. Young women in the US also leaned towards Trump, while in the UK they moved heavily to the Greens.
This is consistent with research from polling company FocalData earlier this year, which found that young people are much more likely than their elders to support a hypothetical national populist party, and a 2020 study that found satisfaction with democracy in the West developed was falling further and faster among young people. adults than any other group.
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All indications are that both defining trends of 2024 are set to continue next year. Recent polls show that the incumbent governments of Australia, Canada, Germany and Norway are on track to lose power in the coming months.
And in most of these countries it is again the populist right that looks set to make the biggest gains. Norway’s right-wing populist party Progress currently leads after finishing fourth in 2021 and Germany’s AfD is currently in second place.
The acute inflation crisis may have passed, but with stubbornly weak economic growth, a generational wealth gap and a fragmented media, 2024 may turn out to be less of an anomaly than a particularly sharp point in a trend. descending.
