Perhaps less widely appreciated, but no less significant, is that this will be a year of elections for the world. In 2024, votes for president, a national legislature or both are set to take place in dozens of countries — including some of the world’s most populous ones (India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Mexico); some of those most closely aligned with the United States (eight European NATO members and, probably, Britain); and some 18 of Africa’s 54 countries (among them Ghana and South Africa, where the African National Congress is at risk of losing its majority for the first time since the 1994 transition to democracy).
The Economist — whose count includes not only countries’ national elections but also municipal ones, as well as voting in 27 European Union countries for the European Parliament — estimates that 2024 will be the biggest election year ever. Voters will cast ballots in countries accounting for about 4.2 billion people, or about 50 percent of global population.
It’s difficult to specify the likely impact of all this voting, but it’s surely unwise to underestimate it. By the time it is over, power might change hands between incumbents and oppositions in multiple nations; new political generations might come into their own. The shift from the left to the libertarian right in Argentina at the end of 2023 provides a preview of how dramatic such changes can be. Election results could transform key nations’ foreign policies and relationships with the United States — whose own policies, of course, could take a radical new direction if Mr. Trump wins the presidency.
The stakes might be highest in Taiwan, which votes on Jan. 13. The Kuomintang (KMT) Party, which is relatively conciliatory toward Beijing, is bidding to replace the governing Democratic Progressive Party, whose roots lie in the island’s human rights movement and which sees close ties with the United States as Taiwanese democracy’s best guarantee against China. There is also a strong third-party contender. China is meddling, mostly by feeding pro-KMT propaganda to Taiwanese voters via social media.
Taiwanese institutions so far seem capable of withstanding that pressure. Yet the quantity of 2024’s elections is much easier to ascertain than their quality. In Mexico and India, the political process is imperfect in many respects but legitimate enough that the outcomes — in each case, probably, victory for an incumbent populist-nationalist party — will provide fresh mandates for the policy paths the two countries are already on.
In Russia, reelection for the incumbent — President Vladimir Putin — is the inevitable outcome of a rigged vote in March. Opponents of his war in Ukraine will have no meaningful opportunity to campaign. In tiny El Salvador, meanwhile, President Nayib Bukele has manipulated the system to allow for his reelection despite constitutional provisions that had appeared to prohibit it. The twist is that Mr. Bukele is so popular — based on his sweeping, legally questionable and, for now, successful crackdown on crime — that few Salvadorans seem inclined to resist his machinations.
El Salvador is one of six Latin American countries slated to hold presidential elections in 2024. This number includes Venezuela, though it is unclear whether the deeply unpopular leftist authoritarian regime in Caracas will permit a free and fair process, as the Biden administration is pressuring it to do. If Venezuela votes legitimately, however, the result could be an inspiring democratic comeback for a country whose economic and political collapse has destabilized the Western Hemisphere.
In short, 2024 will deliver masses of fresh data on democracy’s prospects in the world. Many indicators, such as those published by Freedom House, show “backsliding,” including in Hungary, India, Israel and, yes, the United States. Still, on one key objective metric — whether losing incumbents accept defeat and leave power — there has been little erosion worldwide over the past decade, according to a recent paper by political scientists Andrew Little and Anne Meng.
Another reason for optimism: the backhanded compliment that autocrats such as Mr. Putin feel they must pay democracy by holding elections, even if they are a sham. Such exercises implicitly concede that, in the modern world, the people’s votes are the only universally recognized source of political legitimacy. This norm is the hard-won achievement of centuries, one that the year of elections will surely test but just might reinforce.
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