Was 2024 democracy’s annus horribilis? Actually, that may be yet to come

From the start, we have christened it the year of democracy because more than half of the world’s population – across 72 countries – had the opportunity to vote. But 2024 has truly been the year of anti-incumbency. Elections became protest votes. Sitting presidents and prime ministers received a kicking. Most tended to be turfed out of office or forced to share power.

Credit: Illustration: Joe Benke

In the United States, the world’s most powerful democracy, we have witnessed that rare thing: consecutive one-term presidencies after a trifecta of two-term presidencies. In India, the world’s most populous democracy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi failed to sweep to a third consecutive victory, as was widely predicted. Instead, his Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, was forced into coalition. In South Africa, the African National Congress, which has dominated post-apartheid politics, lost its 30-year parliamentary majority. So much for the much-vaunted advantages of incumbency.

In every developed nation that held elections, the governing party lost ground. As data journalist John Burn-Murdoch noted recently in The Financial Times, this is the first time that has happened in almost 120 years of records, making it “the most hostile environment in history for incumbent parties”. This must be cold-sweat-inducing for the Albanese government, which is defending a meagre three-seat majority.

Britain offered a curious case study. The Tories were turfed out of office after 14 years, and Labour won a whopping 174-seat majority. But this was a loveless landslide. Labour won with a historically low vote share of 33.8 per cent, and it failed to produce any kind of honeymoon period for Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Almost instantly, his unpopular government was hit by the same mood of anti-incumbency that had carried him to power.

Just four months after Starmer entered Downing Street, almost 3 million Britons added their names to an online petition calling for a fresh election. As Starmer reminds us, it is so much easier to be a leader of the opposition than the head of government. The mood of anti-incumbency, moreover, has made politics everywhere more unremittingly oppositional, as Peter Dutton reminds us daily.

Nor is this just a 2024 phenomenon. Since the COVID pandemic took hold in 2020, 40 out of 54 elections held in Western countries have resulted in incumbents being turfed out of office, according to Harvard academic Steven Levitsky, who co-authored the seminal 2018 book How Democracies Die. That’s no historical coincidence. COVID disrupted global supply chains, fuelled inflation and ended the era of cheap money with its unusually low interest rates. Voters the world over are in a rebellious mood. The Clintonian cliche “it’s the economy, stupid” goes a long way towards explaining the malaise, although it could probably do with tweaking: “It’s the inflation, stupid.”

This year of democracy has had some ugly attacks on democratic ideals. South Korea witnessed the imposition of martial law, briefly, for the first time since 1980. Romania had to cancel the second round of its presidential election amid allegations Russia had used TikTok to help a far-right candidate, Calin Georgescu, win the first round of voting. In Russia itself, pro-democracy campaigner Alexei Navalny was murdered by the Putin regime in an Arctic prison colony.

In America, a former president who himself had attacked democracy by refusing to accept defeat in the 2020 presidential election and then inciting a MAGA mob to try to overturn the result himself became the target of attacks on democracy. Twice, Donald Trump survived assassination attempts. At least the election passed off peacefully. The result was not contested. Counting centres did not become flashpoints. Trump won decisively, carrying both the Electoral College and nationwide popular vote. People may not like this outcome, but it was a democratic outcome. Yet what would have happened had he lost? Before the election, he once again defamed democracy by refusing to say he would abide by the result.

The campaign was hardly a great advertisement for US democracy. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, made it feel like a game show at times by giving away $US1 million daily prizes to voters who affirmed support for the right to bear arms. Since only registered voters in key battlegrounds could participate, the scheme looked like a crude attempt at boosting Republican turn-out in states such as Pennsylvania. The owner of the X social media platform has fast become a democratic disruptor. Through posts on X, he also helped publicise the online petition calling for a new British general election.

Elsewhere, there were positive signs. Had Modi won a decisive third-term mandate, he would have pushed through a Hindu nationalist agenda that threatened India’s secular democratic tradition. In South Africa, the setback for the ANC was widely interpreted as a maturing of post-apartheid democracy. In the European parliament elections, far-right parties made gains, but their surge was not as big as predicted. In South Korea, lawmakers have voted to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol.

Yet evidence is mounting of the waning of democracy. In February, a poll conducted in 24 countries by Pew Research found that while democracy is still the preferred system of governance, a median of 59 per cent of people were dissatisfied with how democracy worked for them. US-based democracy watchdog Freedom House, in its 2024 report, found that global freedom had declined for the 18th consecutive year. Anti-incumbency and the regular turnovers of government that it produces are not a sign of democratic good health. Obviously, it shows governments are failing to deliver what voters want.

I do not subscribe to the view that we face a democratic doom spiral. Certainly, though, we are in the midst of a global democratic recession. Let’s hope the Trump years don’t turn it into a full-blown democratic depression.

Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.