The biggest year of global elections in history
This is not so much election year as The Year of Elections. In 2024, the UK will be joined this year by some forty other countries, where voters will be going to the polls with the seemingly democratic opportunity to choose a new government or new national leader. Seemingly democratic because not all nations are as democratic as others. Nobody expects Vladimir Putin to fail in his bid to be re-elected as President of the Russian Federation in the ballot on 15 to 17 March.
Some two billion people, roughly half the world’s adult population, have the opportunity to exercise their franchise: more voters than ever before.
There are make-or-break elections in seven of the globe’s most populous nations – starting with Bangladesh this Sunday 7 January. Followed by Pakistan on 8 February, Indonesia on 14 February, Russia in March, India in April/May, Mexico on 2 June and the big one, the US General Election on 5 November.
Of the other big nations, China does not go in for this sort of thing. Lula took office again as President a year ago in Brazil, where there are municipal elections this year. Nigeria elected a new President in 2023. Japan, number 11 for population size, has until October 2025 before needing another vote.
Among the middle-sized nations going to the polls in 2024, the UK is joined by El Salvador, Iran, Senegal, South Africa, Taiwan, Tunisia and Venezuela.
This year’s bonanza for psephologists has prompted much sententiousness about the state of democracy. Is it booming or going out of fashion? The headline facts are that in this century more nations than ever before are holding elections. But not quite so many are doing so now as twenty years ago. Meanwhile many in established democracies are getting worried by the rise of neo-autocrats in countries as varied as Turkey, Hungary and India – and the possibility of the return of President Trump.
These trends need noting and it is worth measuring Great Britain and Northern Ireland against them as we head into a general election which the Prime Minister told journalists will take place in 2024, even though technically the deadline for a vote is in January 2025.
Comparing our impending election with many of those due elsewhere, we in the UK should comfort ourselves this New Year. Foibles aside, such as the unelected House of Lords, we have not yet slid far down the anti-democratic slide.
Indeed the UK usually features in the top class when experts hand out grades. The Economist Intelligence Unit categorizes democracies from full through to flawed, hybrid and authoritarian. The UK is 18th out of 23 in the “full” class. Ireland is first joined by the Scandinavians at the top of the table. The US, Indonesia, India, Mexico are considered to be “flawed”. Pakistan is “hybrid” and Russia is judged to be authoritarian.
The “flaws” are apparent in Bangladesh, this year’s first election contender. Sheikh Hasina, who incidentally is the aunt of the Labour MP and shadow minister Tulip Siddiq, is seeking a fourth term. The main opposition party is boycotting the vote, because Hasina has refused to step aside temporarily to ensure a fairer contest but the BNP’s 77-year-old leader has still been in hiding following thousands of arrests after anti-government protests.
Excluding the leader’s main opponent from the election is a popular tactic in countries where democracy is wobbly. Alexei Navalny will be sitting out this year’s Russian presidential election in the IK-3 penal colony, or gulag, north of the Arctic Circle. Ousmane Sonko is in prison and his party was dissolved by the Senegalese government back in July, though a court in Senegal ordered last month that the jailed opposition leader be reinstated on the electoral register, paving the way for him to run in February’s presidential election. In India, Rahul Gandhi of the Congress Party has been handed a suspended sentence for defamation and 141 opposition MPs have been suspended from parliament.
We in the UK can be grateful that our judicial system has not been compromised by ruling politicians, in spite of heavy breathing from Boris Johnson and others in recent years. That of course is the complaint or boast of Donald Trump as the indictments and court dates pile up against him. Much as its critics lament it, the quirk that the US constitution does not exclude convicts from occupying the White House, should give the lie to his claim that he is the victim of political persecution.
The American judiciary is explicitly politicized. Final legal judgements of Trump are likely to end up at the US Supreme Court which he and the Republican Senate have packed with partisan appointments and tilted to the right. This is one of the flaws perceived in US democracy; another is voter suppression. America has the largest population of the big countries holding major elections this year but the record for most people going to the polls – an estimated 200 million – will be won by Indonesia because voter registration and apathy keep US turnout down. Even if they manage to vote, the democratic principle of one person one vote does not apply in the US. The State-based electoral college system has ensured that past Presidents, including Trump, have been elected in spite of losing the popular vote.
The UK general election will be the first where voters will have to produce ID. Supporters of the Conservative government which introduced the measure, including Lord Cruddas and Jacob Rees Mogg, were open that it was an attempt to help their vote by excluding their opponents. Rees Mogg subsequently admitted that the “gerrymander” failed in last year’s local elections. Their clever schemes “came back to bite them”, he said, because the new rules deterred older Tory-inclined voters.
It would be wrong to say that those autocratically inclined leaders tempted to bend the system in their favour necessarily need to cheat or bully to win. India’s prime minister Narendra Modi is massively popular. The same can be said of Nayib Bukele, a forty-two year-old of Palestinian descent who is running for a second presidential term in El Salvador in spite of this self-described “coolest dictator in the world”’s authoritarian tendencies, links to corruption and a costly failed attempt to make Bitcoin legal tender.
Looking at the candidates around the world Britons can congratulate themselves that the rapid turnover in party leaders and prime ministers has removed any danger of dynastic rule – such as in Indonesia where term-limited President Jokowi’s son is standing as Vice President – or the waving of term limits, as in Russia.
From that standpoint, it is a bonus that none of our present political leaders are particularly popular as a personality. After Blair, Cameron and Johnson, voters here seem to have had a surfeit of charismatics. Those, including in the Labour opposition, who think that lowering the voting age to 16 could re-invigorate interest in democratic politics should also face up to the fact that younger people are also those most attracted to authoritarian models of government.
Modernisers should also note that technology is the enemy rather than the friend of democratic elections. The hardest system to cheat is voting in person, with ballots counted manually under the supervision of impartial officials. America’s repeated troubles with hanging chads, voting machines and disputed postal votes have demonstrated that to destruction. In this country we need to value out returning officers and vote tellers instead of criticising and discouraging them to the point that there are now problems with recruitment. Their work puts it beyond the bounds of possibility that the loser of the UK General Election will be in a position to do a Trump and claim that the election was stolen.
The United States has already led the world, suffering electoral interference by technology, including by foreign agencies linked to Russia and North Korea. Opportunities to foment chaos and uncertainty have increased exponentially with the popularisation of AI and deep fakes. They are bound to be a disruptive feature in the coming UK campaign. The government has set up an Election Security Preparedness Unit headed by the security minister Tom Tugendhat.
Whoever wins the general election, the UK is well placed this year once again to show that it is truly “a full democracy” and to provide this Year of Elections with a model of how to do an election.
Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life