2024, Year of Elections: how's it all going?

Or is democracy going down the gurgler?

2024 is the big Year of Elections, with an expected 74 national elections plus the EU parliament. So far there have been 66, with more than 1.6 billion ballots cast and an overall turnout of 61% of registered voters, according to International IDEA.

In light of an ongoing concern about democratic backsliding around the world and fears of confusion caused by AI-generated fakes, it’s not been going as badly as it could have. Of course, no one was expecting free and fair elections in Russia, Venezuela or Iran, but many have gone reasonably well, though not without drama. Let’s look at just a few.

The Arab Spring of 2011 was sparked in Tunisia and raised hopes for democratisation in the region, but those hopes haven’t been realised. A referendum in Tunisia in July 2022 – boycotted by most of the people – authorised concentration of executive powers in the hands of the president, supposedly to end infighting and paralysis in government, and later that year a parliamentary election had a turnout below nine percent. Only 29 percent turned out in October’s presidential election following controversy over the rejection of some candidates from the ballot.

Elections in Pakistan are normally chaotic and violent. This year’s resulted in an AI-generated video of Imran Khan (who was in prison) declaring victory, after his party had effectively been erased from the ballot, forcing their candidates to run as independents. On 3 March, however, Shehbaz Sharif (brother of former PM Nawaz Sharif) was re-elected as Prime Minister by the National Assembly, having formed a coalition.

In South Africa, the ANC lost the majority it had held since the end of the apartheid regime, and they formed a coalition government with the liberal Democratic Alliance and others. Cyril Ramaphosa was re-elected as president.

Conservative nationalist parties have created waves especially in the EU parliamentary election in June. That triggered France’s president Macron to call a snap election for the National Assembly. Arising from France’s two-round single-member district system, the party that got the largest number of votes, the Rassemblement National, ended up coming third in numbers of seats, as the centrist and leftist blocs tactically withdrew candidates to out-number them in the second round. Macron appointed the experienced and conservative Michel Barnier as prime minister.

Austria has a proportional system, and the conservative nationalist Freedom Party (FPÖ) won the plurality (with 28.8%), only to find themselves locked out of office by a three-party coalition (comprising centre-right, centre-left and liberal parties). Are the FPÖ a threat to democracy, or is their exclusion from power a threat to democracy? The answer depends on where you stand politically.

UK Labour won a solid majority in the Commons, but with only one third of the vote on a 60% turnout, meaning only one in five registered voters went out and ticked a box for a Labour candidate. For that massively disproportionate “victory”, Prime Minister Starmer can thank the first-past-the-post system and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party which split the right-wing vote in local constituencies. And they call this a “high-performing” democratic system.

In the US, Donald Trump convincingly won the presidency. He’s gone conspicuously silent, however, on his earlier allegations of “massive cheating” in the election, as compared with his sore-loser performance in 2020. Vice-President Harris, who lost to Trump this time around, will have the pleasant duty of confirming Electoral College results before Congress, just as Mike Pence did on January 6, 2021, while a MAGA mob was storming the Capitol calling for him to be hanged. At least Biden and Harris have promised a peaceful transition of power.

Meanwhile, Germany’s coalition government has collapsed and there’ll be an early election there in February 2025. The Christian Democratic union are leading in the low 30s in opinion polls, so it looks like a change of government coming there. Will they need another grand coalition?

International IDEA’s Global State of Democracy report covers elections up to and including 2023. It concludes that:

“Democracy continued its recent decline in 2023, with notable challenges emerging with regard to Representation and Rights. Assessing each country’s various areas of improvement and deterioration, we find that, on balance, four in nine countries were worse off in 2023 than they had been in 2018, while only one in four had improved, continuing a negative trend that developed roughly a decade ago.”

Freedom House report that:

“Many governments sought to control electoral outcomes while still claiming the political legitimacy that only a free and fair election can confer. Their curation of the online information space through censorship and content manipulation often reinforced offline efforts to plant seeds of doubt in or rig the voting itself. For example, a number of incumbents restricted access to content about the opposition, reducing their opponents’ ability to persuade and mobilize voters, or simply boosted their own preferred narratives about the election results. Censorship and content manipulation frequently began well before an electoral period, disrupting the crucial discussion and debate necessary for voters to form and express their views.”

Some people say there’s too much freedom of speech online; others say there’s not enough. It depends on where you live and how authoritarian your government is.

Democracy is in trouble, but the world’s leading democracies aren’t setting the greatest examples. Would you put your hand on your heart and declare that America is still “leader of the free world” or fondly say that Westminster is “mother of parliaments”? One little-discussed problem is that the leading democracies are in fact representative systems that aren’t really all that democratic, even when their electoral systems are working as they’re supposed to and the press is relatively free. This gap between the word “democracy” and how governments actually work helps to explain the rise of populism and the decline of political trust. The whole system needs a rethink; the people who run it need to do some critical reflection.