Dive into the latest insights on global voting trends and their impact on democratic engagement. Understand the dynamics of voter participation across different nations and the implications for future elections.
After a summer’s break, I am writing when we are into the fourth quarter of the year of elections in which around a third of the world is voting. Yet we are still on the edge of our seats as the ultimate contest, the spectacular closing ceremony, is still a toss-up. I speak of course of the US election on November 5th.
As a recovering political consultant who subsequently spent many years working at building electoral integrity, I can’t wait until the final whistle to offer commentary: the US presidential election is both spectacle and world-shaping. It may not be the year’s biggest – that’s India; it is unlikely to be stolen like Venezuela, Trump’s claims aside. Nor we hope will Trump, despite his implicit threats, be able to overthrow an outcome he does not like. In Bangladesh the ruling party won by a landslide but fell to student protests months later. Yet despite each contest’s unique characteristics, the first nine months did establish a form that may run through the rest of the year.
In this year’s State of the Union, President Biden intoned: “What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack – both at home and overseas at the very same time.”¹ He maintained this argument prominently in his campaign appearances. Americans – and the world – he thought faced a choice: democracy with him; authoritarianism with Trump. “Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today.”
The elections were expected, by many incumbents facing populists, to be a referendum on democracy versus autocracy. They weren’t. And where leaders have tried to make them that, they have come a cropper. Most notably of course Joe Biden, who insisted that the election was about the survival of democracy, was unseated well before the finishing line. Indeed if that was the framing of the elections, many democracy champions had a bad day.
But I would argue, as I have in earlier Substacks, that it wasn’t about democracy as philosophy but rather about economic security and incumbency. By that later measure, there were fewer upsets. Post-Covid economic disruption and its inflationary consequences² set the electoral stage for 2024. The dynamic has been a strong demand for change. The status quo has not in general delivered for people’s pocket books. And so incumbents have been in trouble all year. In Britain, the Tories after 14 years in power were reduced to 121 seats – the smallest number ever. In France, President Macron, who claimed that his snap election was about saving the Fifth Republic from the anti-democratic front, temporarily contained the rise of the right but the real losers were his own governing party that was eviscerated for its economic record. Now he has been forced to nominate a prime minister who can only govern with the blessing of that hard right.
Old elites claiming they represent democracy against civil society insurgents lost in Senegal where the presidency was won by a young tax inspector largely unknown to the country’s old elites. Among a number of the West Africa Sahel neighbours, democrats were replaced by military leaders because they too had failed to deliver the economic goods – jobs and services; and in that instance, physical security.
Most strikingly, Prime Minister Modi in India retained power but sharply underperformed expectations. No doubt partly due to the hubris of his increasingly authoritarian behaviour but more the fact that his pro-market economic reforms had not delivered the economic benefits to more marginal population groups. Similarly President Ramaphosa and the ANC in South Africa lost their majority and have had to hold onto power in coalition. A third of South Africans are unemployed and in the under-24 age group it is 60%. No argument about the ANC’s venerated liberation movement status, and its storied role in ending apartheid and establishing democracy, could withstand such numbers.
Not every incumbent lost everywhere. In Mexico, the ruling party candidate Gloria Sheinbaum barnstormed to an impressive victory. This after her predecessor Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) allowed the Mexican economy to lose competitiveness. However, he also embarked on a program of heavy subsidies, targeted at the poor, that was aimed at positively shifting economic distribution in the economy. So, despite the mixed results³, AMLO got a much better rating from Mexicans for his economic record than his neighbour, Joe Biden. But like Biden, AMLO’s successor is a dynamic new-ish female face. For Kamala Harris or Sheinbaum being the candidate of change becomes a matter of generation and gender more than formal policy separation from their predecessor.
This allowed Sheinbaum to be the rare incumbent who could don the mantle of change agent in the election. A motley array of opponents looked like a throwback to an earlier, more unequal Mexico, where parties were out of touch with people’s needs. And Sheinbaum’s fresh(ish) face, able to claim the mantle of change despite incumbency, brings us back to the Barnum and Bailey of elections – the US. There a highly skilled entry by Harris has reversed the change dynamic. In a Biden-Trump race, the mantle of change belonged to Trump who appeared to remind voters of what they thought were better times. Against Harris, he is the symbol of a decade-long chronic disorder in the political system of an unhappy status quo. Harris appears the sunny uplands but both are still tussling to win that crown, Change.
With national politics struggling then almost everywhere to meet the aspirations of people who feel under pressure, I continue my own small effort to make sure we don’t forget that other critical level of governance in a world of shared borders and problems – multilateralism. It cannot usually substitute for shortcomings of national governance but as a polycrisis agenda drives the need for internationally coordinated responses on everything from infectious disease to climate, migration, food and water security and much else, we need to keep our multilateral system robust – often despite the politicians. I attach a couple of pieces I have written over the summer. One for Foreign Policy on multilateralism and the next US President and one on successful multilateral leadership and its particular attributes in the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation annual report on leadership within the UN.
I have also now plunged into a project we are calling BWI at 80, advising Kristalina Georgieva, the Managing Director of the IMF, and Ajay Banga, President of the World Bank Group, on the future challenges for both institutions. We formally kick off later this month with a small retreat at the Bretton Woods Hotel in New Hampshire, the same venue where 80 years ago the conference was held that established the two institutions. I attach a press release on the three person advisory panel of which I am part. My co-members are Sri Mulyani Indrawati, the outgoing Indonesian Finance Minister, and Patrick Achi, former Prime Minister of Côte d’Ivoire. We will take our consultations on the road and seek as wide a range of views as possible on the institutions’ future. So more to follow in future Substacks.
An early taster: in a July celebration I attended in Washington to mark the anniversary of the original 1944 conference, a young WBG staffer Saanya Jain spoke about how part of her role is to think through the infrastructure needed for sustainable green energy to power our future world economy. Currently she is working on coal phase down, despite those same coal plants involved being economic anchors across Haryana, India; and very humanly, a place where both her grandfathers worked and through which her parents first met. But Saanya laid out how closing down coal plants wasn’t the shuttering of an era of economic growth, but rather an opportunity to build up new, dynamic pathways to economic mobility. Saanya’s story reminds us that these issues of energy transition and the rest evolve alongside our changing world and can’t be left aside as our politicians fight for power. These may be hard things to campaign on but politicians have to win mandates for bold leadership – and the multilateral system needs to be right there with them.
Click HERE to sign up to Substack.
Lord Mark Malloch-Brown is a British diplomat, communications consultant, journalist and former politician. He was president of Open Society Foundations from 2021 to 2023, having previously served as Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations under Kofi Annan from April to December 2006. A former member of the Labour Party, he served as Minister of State for Africa and the United Nations in the Brown government from 2007 to 2009.
Mark Malloch-Brown
Afghanistan: The Trump-Biden Debacle – Three years on
America’s – and NATO’s – Afghanistan disaster: Still a possible peace solution with a Marshall Plan.
Not Knowing the Color of the Sky in Afghanistan
Ukraine: Putin’s Vietnam
Focus on Afghanistan: Peter Jouvenal – A journalist veteran held by the Taliban
Back to the Cold War
Russia’s Ukraine Intervention: Death by a Thousand Cuts?
Russia and China: The Bros in the Owner’s Box
Building Bridges for Geneva and the world: Breaking the silos
Focus on Afghanistan: Peter Jouvenal – A journalist veteran held by the Taliban