2024 was the year of the vote. More than 60 countries – home to nearly half the planet’s population – selected their leaders. In the history of democracy, it is a first.
In the history of humankind, it was a remarkable coming of age, an evolution, that at its best would not just reveal our collective soul but also propel us to better days. But what did we learn?
The results, maybe, were less satisfying than many had hoped. It appears we are still selfish, survivalist in the immediate sense, and tribal – by and large we voted for ourselves and not our collective interests. Fear and greed remain big motivators.
In many industrialized countries, like the United Kingdom, the topic took a back seat to more immediate concerns like putting food on the table today, not ensuring we can grow it a hundred years from now. Concerns over the economy are what helped give Keir Starmer’s Labour Party such a decisive victory, after 14 years in opposition, over the Conservatives.
Climate change – potentially an existential threat for all of us – failed to cut through this year.
United States President Joe Biden was also a victim of the trend. He’d got inflation down, but not prices, while wages hadn’t gone up; people felt the pain and voted for change in the form of Donald Trump.
Viewed dispassionately, it may seem odd that a leader with a track record of lying and climate denial could land a successful message.
But seen from closer to home it really shouldn’t be so shocking. Across the world, most voters did what they traditionally do and voted with their wallets, punishing, even tossing out, incumbents.
Even where votes hadn’t been foreseen, elections continued to populate 2024 almost to the year’s end.
In mid-December, Germany’s moribund economy sank Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government when the Bundestag voted no confidence in his fractured coalition, triggering snap elections in early 2025.
From Algeria and Azerbaijan to Taiwan and Tuvalu, from the Solomon Islands to South Africa, democracy and the freedom to choose leaders has been embraced in a way unimaginable in countries where just a century or so ago voting, if available, was restricted to the wealthy, the middle-aged, and in many cases no women at all.
Biden and the UK Conservatives weren’t the only incumbents who had a bad year. In India, PM Narendra Modi’s populist nationalist party, the BJP, had its vote share cut; in South Africa, the party of Nelson Mandela lost its majority for the first time; and in the European Union, voters also shunned the mainstream, looking to populists on the left and particularly on the right. Mexico was unusual in seeing a sitting party improve its position.
In Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina easily won another term as president only to be swept from office by protesters, an indication that where the leader, and the ballot box, are widely distrusted, the trappings of democracy won’t save them.
But still, some votes stand out more than others. Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential contest is undoubtedly the most consequential, while French President Emmanuel Macron calling a snap vote after the EU parliamentary election is perhaps the most informative.
Like Modi in the world’s largest democracy of 1.4 billion people, Macron – with a much smaller electorate of about 50 million – lost significant support.
The populist nationalist Modi and reform-minded centrist Macron are still relatively powerful, but their political heft has been weakened because voters were unhappy with their economic performance.
In both cases, the hardships were largely beyond their control. The economic pain shared across the world, created in part by the long tail of Covid, coupled with the war in Ukraine driving up energy prices.
As the famous saying goes, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
The reason Macron’s victory is the most instructive is because it shows that where populism has historically been strongest it can still be challenged.
Macron had called the French parliamentary election immediately following the successes of France’s populist nationalists in the massive, 27-nation European Parliament elections in June.
His decision came on the heels of hosting the 80th anniversary commemoration of D-Day in Normandy, where France, and Macron, appeared at their finest, hosting myriad world leaders, World War II veterans, even royalty.
The event itself reflected a time when democracy was imagined to be coming of age, having seen off Nazism, yet held when once again the shadows of some of those same dark tendencies are lengthening.
At the celebrations Macron seemed buoyed and in control.
But just days later the EU election delivered an ego-busting blow and he appeared to be on the verge of a major miscalculation.
Although his position was safe, he was making a huge gamble. If the right-wing populists took parliament, his final years in office would be as a lame-duck president.
Macron’s bet landed his country with a conservative prime minister – rather than one from the populist right – who lost a confidence vote 57 days later. Macron then plucked another PM from a dwindling list of potential candidates, this time a centrist who described his task ahead as “Himalayan.” It may have paid off in the short term, but Trump’s success in the United States and the growth of the far right in Germany speak to an incoming tide that the French president has yet to figure out how to turn.
Perhaps the least unexpected result, and possibly the biggest abuse of the concept of democracy, could become one of the most consequential.
Vladimir Putin’s 87% share in Russia’s March presidential vote is an object lesson in what democracy is not.
It is not about political opponents languishing, or in the case of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, dying in jail just a few weeks before the election, neither is it about Putin’s chilling totalitarian grip on media. Nor his pernicious, meddling reach in Moldova, which narrowly voted to remain out with his grasp, nor Romania where the presidential vote was overturned, an apparent victim of social media jacking with telltale Russian hallmarks.
Next year will see a reprise of Putin and Trump’s relationship.
How the re-elected most powerful man in the world handles one of the most frequently illegitimately re-elected leaders in the world will test Europe’s future stability, and with it, global faith in the values of democracy.
Ironically their point of contest will be over Ukraine, a democracy overdue for an election but unable to hold one because of Putin’s illegal invasion, annexation of swaths of eastern Ukraine and Crimea and his military’s continued war there.
On his re-election campaign trail Trump vowed to end the war “in 24 hours” as well as cut the US support that is helping to stop Putin steamrollering the rest of Ukraine.
A Trump-Putin deal that validates illegality and illegitimacy over democratic norms would be a chilling way to kickstart 2025.
Trump has many options. Most Ukrainians will hope he chooses the values that began making America great even before the US army joined in with that WWII assault on Normandy.
And in this of course is a lesson in global democracy. Times change and so does popular will. The American people resoundingly voted for Trump, knowingly picking a more isolationist foreign policy president. It’s what they want, for now at least.
Perhaps the big takeaway of democracy’s impressive 2024 showing, is also the lesson of 1944 – how much one country’s electorate impacts another’s choices. It is a lesson writ larger and more complicatedly than any previous year.
The US is perhaps entering the twilight as global trendsetter, but its impact, be it on influencing the climate change calculations of India’s Modi and the actions of his populous nation, or a peace deal in Ukraine that signals Putin towards more deadly invasions, can easily affect countries thousands of miles way.
Trump is stacking his cabinet and White House with disruptors, as he is entitled to do; in four years Americans will be able to oust him, as they also are entitled to do.
That’s the trajectory that has got half the planet to the polls this year.
The democratic experiment has been working, mostly. Now is not the time to retreat.
It’s a lesson not lost on the Syrians emerging in late December from more than half a century of brutal Assad family dictatorship, whose 2025 might just hold the prospect of finally getting a share of democracy’s sweet allure and a trip to the polls themselves to pick their next leader.
