Who says democracy is dying? A record-breaking 40-plus countries, representing more than 40% of the world’s population and an outsized chunk of global GDP, are due to hold national elections in 2024. The outcomes, taken separately and together, will help determine who controls and directs the 21st-century world.
Casting lots in this multinational, multiparty democratic Super Bowl are some of the most powerful and wealthiest states (the US, India, the UK), some of the weakest (South Sudan), the most despotic (Russia, Iran) and the most stressed (Taiwan, Ukraine). Some elections will be open, free and fair, many less so. Some will not be free at all.
Paradoxically, this unprecedented vote-fest comes at a moment when classic forms of liberal democracy are under existential attack from authoritarians and dictators such as China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, far-right nationalist-populist parties such as Fidesz in Hungary, and military coup plotters and Islamist militants from Venezuela to Chad.
Global freedom declined for the 17th consecutive year, Freedom House, the independent, US-based watchdog, concluded in its 2023 report: “Moscow’s war of aggression led to devastating human rights atrocities in Ukraine. New coups and other attempts to undermine representative government destabilised Burkina Faso, Tunisia, Peru, and Brazil … Ongoing repression continued to diminish basic liberties in Guinea and constrain those in Turkey, Myanmar and Thailand, among others.”
Yet the report said while 35 countries experienced declines in political rights and civil liberties, 34 saw overall gains. Autocrats were neither infallible nor unbeatable: “The effects of corruption and a focus on political control at the expense of competence exposed the limits of the authoritarian models offered by Beijing, Moscow, Caracas, or Tehran.”
The principle of free speech, essential to fully functioning democracy, is also under attack, rights campaigner Jacob Mchangama argued in Foreign Policy magazine. “Even open democracies have imposed restrictive measures to combat a range of threats including hate speech, disinformation, extremism and public disturbances,” he wrote, citing increased EU online regulation and curbs on pro-Palestinian protests.
The geopolitical and economic impacts of so many ballot box battles, occurring more or less at once, may combine to further destabilise an unstable world – for good or bad. It would be inspiring, for example, if voters kicked out Iran’s murderously misogynistic clerical conservatives in March’s parliamentary polls. But the fix is in. More than 25% of opposition candidates have already been disqualified.
Many Iranians are expected to boycott the vote. That’s what happened last week in Egypt, where the former coup leader, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, barred his only credible opponent from standing against him for the presidency. Likewise, this month’s gerrymandered “patriots only” district elections in Hong Kong left voters asking why bother? Turnout was 27%, compared to 71% before China made a nonsense of the process.
Yet the title of 2024’s most bogus election must go to Russia, with Belarus a possible close second. Putin has jailed, exiled or eliminated rivals; his bid for a fifth presidential term will be more imperial coronation than contest. His personal approval rating remains high after nearly 25 years at the top because many Russians know no other leader. The serfs were emancipated by Tsar Alexander II in 1861. Tsar Putin I is reversing the process.
That said, some elections may produce genuine turning points. Unpredictable, volatile Pakistan and Bangladesh both go to the polls in 2024. And this spring’s general election in India, the world’s most populous democracy, is no foregone conclusion. Prime minister Narendra Modi’s hopes of a third term could be frustrated by a new, 28-party opposition coalition called INDIA – Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance.
Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party dominates in north and central India, while Modi himself is viewed as an electoral superstar, unlike Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition Congress party. Yet his unattractive, autocratic tendencies, reflected in curbs on independent journalism, mystery deaths of opponents abroad and the brutal army crackdown in Kashmir, will raise doubts about the poll’s fairness. A surprise Modi defeat could have strategic ramifications, hurting US attempts to woo India as an ally and counterweight to China.
Next month’s elections in self-ruling Taiwan, which China regards as a renegade province, will provide a valuable demonstration of how highly democracy is still valued – when a determined people are allowed a real choice amid fierce external pressures. If Taipei’s pro-independence Democratic Progressive party wins again, an infuriated Beijing could move beyond the usual military threats. This in turn could quickly draw in the US and regional allies.
Another seismic prospect, in terms of potential political earthquakes, is South Africa’s general election. For the first time since Nelson Mandela walked to freedom and the apartheid era ended 30 years ago in 1994, the ANC could lose its overall majority, undercut by challengers such as the Democratic Alliance.
Odds are the ANC, in possible coalition with the leftist Economic Freedom Fighters, will cling to power. But the party looks set to be punished by voters for years of shameless corruption, leadership scandals, high rates of crime and unemployment, and its inability, literally, to keep the lights on – daily power cuts of up to six hours have become routine. A low turnout could seal the ANC’s fate.
Disillusion with democracy is a much-discussed issue across all of Africa, the world’s fastest growing continent – as it is elsewhere. Comfort Ero and Murithi Mutiga of the International Crisis Group noted this month that seven African leaders were toppled by their own militaries between August 2020 and November 2023. These were among 13 successful coups in Africa since 2000, mainly in a “belt of instability” stretching from Niger to Sudan. Not all the leaders overthrown were popularly elected.
While all coups are essentially anti-democratic in nature, they have multiple causes. These include abuse of power, economic woes, corruption, Islamist insurgencies, rigged elections and personal rivalries. But it is clear that, far from being unwelcome, some recent coups, such as that in Mali in 2021, enjoyed substantial public support. Violent regime change was better, it seems, than no regime change at all.
Most Africans “still have faith in democracy [yet] they have been desperate to rid themselves of regimes that purport to be democratic but often fail to deliver on democracy’s most basic promises”, Ero and Mutiga wrote. This conclusion surely has universal relevance. Meanwhile, the democracy show rolls on. Algeria, Tunisia, Ghana, Rwanda, Namibia, Mozambique, Senegal, Togo and South Sudan are among the African countries holding elections in 2024.
Wars and conflict demonstrably hamper ability to conduct and maintain democratic governance. Ukraine, for example, is due a presidential election by the spring. Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s five-year term is up. Yet although, under martial law, elections are suspended, a vote that acts as a safety valve to release internal tensions and popular discontents would be a worthwhile exercise – even if Putin tried to bomb it. It would show democracy refuses to be killed.
Israel may soon find itself in a similar predicament if, as prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu hopes and expects, the war in Gaza continues well into next year. Polls suggest Israelis, probably a majority, want to jettison Netanyahu’s hard-right coalition, which they blame for failing to prevent the 7 October attacks. No election is scheduled, but war or no war, grassroots pressure to hold one is likely to grow.
Surveys indicate dissatisfaction with the present-day workings of democracy is a sentiment common throughout the nations of the west – meaning, principally, the US and Europe – even though they see themselves as democracy’s home ground. As in Africa, democracy itself is not the problem. It’s the way it is applied and practised. A recent Ipsos opinion poll in western countries found a widespread belief that current democratic systems favour the rich and powerful and ignore everyone else.
Around seven in 10 Americans said the state of democracy had declined in recent years, while 73% in France agreed. More than six in 10 people in the UK believed democracy was working less well than five years ago, according to the poll. Respondents in all but one of the countries surveyed, which also included Croatia, Italy, Poland and Sweden, agreed “radical change” was needed.
Changed or not, Europe will see elections in 2024 in Austria, Belgium, Croatia and Finland, as well as for the European parliament in June. The pervasive fear is that they will produce more advances by nationalist-populist, anti-migrant, xenophobic parties of the far right, matching those seen recently in Italy, the Netherlands and Slovakia.
In the UK, the problem is slightly different. Despite priding itself on a long democratic tradition, Britain has endured two unelected Conservative prime ministers in little more than a year. Bizarrely, it’s not certain the next UK general election will be held in 2024 at all.
Mexico’s presidential election in June is certain to catch the eye when, breaking glass ceilings, two women candidates will compete for the top job. But toward year’s end, all eyes will turn to the US, whose presidential showdown between two old men, described as the most important of modern times, will be held in November.
President Joe Biden divides the world crudely into rival democratic and autocratic camps. He says this is the defining struggle of the age. So if he fails to beat his likely Republican challenger, Donald Trump – a man who says he will not act as a dictator if elected but evidently cannot wait to do so – then many around the world, starting with Putin and Xi, may conclude it’s all up with democracy.
A Trump victory – and the ensuing chaotic Jacobean-style revenge tragedy it will inevitably trigger –could permanently upend the international order, tipping the balance towards authoritarianism and dictatorship. If the US, “the city upon a hill”, ceases to fight for it, democracy will surely wither and die.
