Project 2025: Key takeaways from ‘Year of Elections’

The biggest year of elections just passed by. Elections in 64 countries saw every second person in the world voting for a representative.  What do the results of these elections tell? Certainly, the message is not: “Make the year 2025 as the year of fulfilling electoral promises”. The way people have voted has other messages than just changing a government for not fulfilling promises or putting others in power to ensure these promises are delivered. These electoral contests took place at a time when the planet is deeply entangled in multiple crises: a new disruptive climate with impacts never experienced before; inflation, particularly food, sweeping across the world; the resultant impact of people struggling for the basics as latest food insecurity data shows; and finally, a world scattering into “me first” blocks with countries redrafting their interactions with the presumed “globalised world”.

From the US to Botswana, many countries saw change in regimes, many of them long entrenched in power and many were also outrightly unexpected. So, one message of the biggest electoral year in history could be that people wanted a change, for whatever reasons. The year also saw many right-wing parties coming to power, in Europe and the US, besides other countries.  The parties of this ideology were never expected to be in power. Rather, they have become mainstream political parties in their respective country. At the same time, in many countries people have brought left-leaning parties into power. In the binary of left-right ideology, the elections don’t seem to have been definitive on one.

A Pew Research Center survey of the elections in 2024 is sure about the consistency of economic challenges as an electoral issue across the globe. In one of its surveys in early 2024, it found that “a median of 64 per cent of adults said their national economy was in bad shape.” Major countries – like France, Japan, South Africa, South Korea and the UK – the survey reported seven-in-10 people felt economic gloom as a major issue. The Pew Research Center in its analysis of several surveys done in 2024 says that there is a message from these elections that is more foundational: “A broader frustration with the functioning of representative democracy.”  More than half of the adults in 31 countries in a survey in 2024 done by the Pew Center were dissatisfied with the way democracy worked in their country. “In several high-income nations, dissatisfaction has increased significantly over the past three years,” said the survey. In the survey, people usually felt disconnected from political leaders and institutions. Besides, they said no political parties represented their views. More importantly, despite being an electoral democracy, the survey found that people clearly said they didn’t have any influence on their politics.

In this change in people’s trust on democracy, how would this system of governance sustain? There is no way to ascertain whether people would throw away democratic systems. But there are certain indications that people would be opting for regimes that seem to be, scarily, more prone to doing away with liberal democratic principles. This shows up in far-right parties taking over, in Europe and the US particularly. These parties are basically exploiting people’s anger against the existing system, and people without any viable alternative are voting for them as a verdict against the current regime. 

However unresponsive it is, the representative democracy model still is the way people have some say over their representatives. The way people are losing faith, calls for a wider deliberation on how to make the elected more responsive.