What many political analysts forecast as “the year of democracy” is turning out to be the year of the insurgents.
More than 60 countries, home to half the global population, are holding or have already held national elections this year. What many political analysts forecast as “the year of democracy” is turning out to be the year of the insurgents, as ruling parties fall around the world. It is a trend that Democrats are desperately hoping won’t apply to Kamala Harris this November.
After 14 years in power, the U.K.’s Conservative Party faced its worst-ever electoral defeat. The far-right party Alternative for Germany surged in European Parliament elections, as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats suffered their own worst-ever defeat. South Africa’s African National Congress lost its majority for the first time since the end of apartheid. South Korea’s conservatives were knocked out of power, and in Senegal, the ruling coalition fell to an anti-corruption candidate. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi—by some accounts the most popular leader in the world—held on after a surprisingly tight election. And in France’s snap elections, voters lurched toward the far right in an initial round before consolidating behind a left-wing government in the ensuing runoff.
The most universal theme of these results has not been the rise of far-right populism or the ascendency of far-left socialists. It has been the downfall of the establishment, the disease of incumbency, a sweeping revolt against elites. Voters of the world are sick and tired of whoever’s in charge. “By and large, people are unhappy with their governments, much more unhappy with their governments than they were 10 or 20, 30, 40 years ago,” Steve Levitsky, a government professor at Harvard, told NPR. “So, with some exceptions, being an incumbent is increasingly a disadvantage.”
One obvious culprit is the world economy. Even as pandemic deaths wound down in 2021 and 2022, supply-chain disruptions, combined with fidgety spenders who’d spent months in lockdown, sent prices surging around the world. At its peak, inflation exceeded 6 percent in France, 7 percent in Canada, 8 percent in Germany, 9 percent in the United Kingdom, and 10 percent in Italy. In other countries—Argentina, Venezuela, Turkey, Ethiopia—inflation exceeded 20 percent. Inflation erodes not only voters’ buying power but also their confidence in the ruling class. When voters feel poorer, they predictably take it out on their leaders.
But the success of political insurgents in 2024 cannot be reduced exclusively to materialist factors such as prices and economic growth. Voters are cultural creatures too, and dissatisfaction with global elites may represent a cultural evolution as much as a rebellion against higher prices.
In his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public, the former CIA analyst Martin Gurri observed that when the digital revolution unleashed a flood of “information flows”—articles, websites, posts, comments—it permanently altered the public’s relationship with elites.
