A year of elections in democracies around the world is revealing deep dissatisfaction among voters
At a community center in east London, about twenty men gathered for their regular lunch meeting, drinking coffee and tea from mismatched mugs and engaging in an increasingly popular pastime among the world’s democracies: complaining about their government.
They feel alienated from the country’s leadership rich prime minister and their parliamentarians.
“It feels like you’re second-class people. Our MPs do not represent us. Political leaders don’t understand what we’re going through,” said Barrie Stradling, 65. “Are they listening to people? I do not think so.”
In a coffee shop in Jakarta, 46-year-old Ni Wayan Suryatini lamented the outcome of the recent elections, in which the son of Indonesia’s former president ascended to the country’s vice presidency and opposition parties seemed to do little to stop him.
“It’s hard to trust them because they only want to achieve their goals. As long as they achieve their goals, they will forget everything else,” Suryatini said of politicians.
And in her cheerfully cluttered craft shop in Greeley, Colorado, Sally Otto, 58, reflected with dread on the upcoming US presidential election between President Joe Biden and the man he defeated in 2020, former President Donald Trump: ‘I feel like we be back where we were, with the same two bad choices,” Otto said.
If half of the world’s population votes in elections this year, the voters are in a bad mood. By South Korea Unpleasant Poland Unpleasant Argentina, incumbents have been ousted in election after election. In Latin America alone, leaders and their parties had lost 20 elections in a row until last weekend’s presidential election in Mexico, according to a review by Steven Levitsky, a government professor at Harvard.
The dynamic is likely to repeat itself as the European Union launches its parliamentary elections this week, with conservative populist parties expected to make gains across the continent. EU parliamentary elections are usually an opportunity for voters in individual countries to express their frustrations, as the candidates they choose will hold power in Brussels rather than in their own national capitals. In Britain, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has called elections for later this summer, in which his party is expected to struggle.
“In many ways, we’ve never had it objectively better, and yet people are so dissatisfied,” said Matthias Matthijs, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC.
The reasons for the discontent are many, from social media’s ability to amplify problems to the painful recovery from the coronavirus pandemic to the backlash to economic and cultural changes brought on by globalization and mass immigration.
Although the populist right in countries like Europe has and continues to make several gains expected to make moreThere is little ideological consistency in the accident worldwide. In a recent Pew survey in 24 democraciesOn average, 74% of respondents said they did not think politicians cared what people like them think, and 42% said no political party represented their position.
“It’s about economics and culture, but it’s also about the functioning of politics itself,” said Richard Wike, director of Pew’s Global Attitudes Research, citing the polarization of voters into warring camps. “It can lead to a situation where politics is seen as a zero-sum game. People see more of an existential threat from the other side, and that makes people dissatisfied with democracy.”
Experts say there is one notable exception to the trend of global anger toward elected leaders — places where the leaders are anti-establishment, populist strongmen of all ideological persuasions.
“As an anti-system outsider, populist figures are winning more than in the past,” Levitsky said. “Whether it is a movement is unclear to me.”
In Mexico, left-wing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is ousted, but he broke the losing streak for Latin America’s leading parties when his hand-picked successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, emerged victorious. Sunday’s presidential elections. In Argentina, newly elected President Javier Milei, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist” whom admirers call “the madman,” has remains popular despite the country’s crippling economic problems that have persisted after his austerity and deregulation reforms.
“I was never interested in politics because nothing ever changed,” said Sebastian Sproviero, a 37-year-old engineer at a concert in Buenos Aires where Milei performed rock songs. “Now it is.”
In India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been criticized for eroding the world’s most populous democracy, the Pew survey found the country had the strongest support for a more authoritarian form of government of any country surveyed, with two-thirds of respondents in favor of it was of a strong government leadership system.
Yet even some of the more authoritarian governments, such as Modi’s, have faced dissatisfaction with the status quo. Modi appears to have won his third term as India’s prime minister in national elections concluded Tuesday, but his conservative Hindu nationalist party performed disappointingly and will likely have to join a coalition to form a government.
In Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has filled the judiciary and the media with loyalists and revise the country’s constitution To benefit his party, a former member of his Fidesz party, Péter Magyar, has emerged as a new, increasingly popular critic and challenger.
“More and more people in Hungary are increasingly feeling this anti-establishment desire,” said Péter Ember as he attended one of Magyar’s recent demonstrations in Budapest. “We really want to reform this existing political culture, from the opposition to the ruling party. We want a new one, and we want people to work for us.”
The global anti-incumbency mood, coupled with the success of anti-establishment populists, comes amid several warning signs for the health of democracy. The Pew poll found that democracy’s appeal was declining, even as it remained the preferred system of government around the world. Freedom House, a Washington-based organization that promotes democracy, said the Freedom Index, which measures democratic health worldwide, has fallen for 18 consecutive years.
Adrian Shahbaz, vice president at Freedom House, attributed the erosion of support to a series of crises since the turn of the century, including the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, the 2008-2009 global recession and the coronavirus. pandemic. Adding to the stress, he says, is the increasing focus on identity issues transgender policy And immigration in democratic politics, especially in Europe and the US
“The main fault lines in democracies revolve around issues of identity rather than economic issues,” Shahbaz said. “That in itself can be very risky, because democracy depends on a civic identity that goes beyond tribal identifications.”
Yet the picture is not all bleak for democracy. The anti-incumbent fervor has also contributed to some victories on people’s right to choose their own leaders.
In Senegal, voters chose in March a new chairman after the incumbent tried in vain to postpone the election. Last year in Guatemala, Bernardo Arévalo, a sociologist and crusader against corruption, won the country’s presidential elections despite attempts by the incumbent party to block the certification of his victory.
One of the biggest tests will come in November in the US, when voters will decide whether they want that stick with Biden or bring back Trump to the White House. The former president tried in vain to be overthrown his 2020 election losslead to the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and two of the four criminal cases he is currently facing. Biden, meanwhile, is hampered by it an unenthusiastic audience – 61% of adults disagreed with his term in office an AP-NORC poll taken in March. A CNN poll found that 53% of registered voters were unhappy with the choice between Biden and Trump.
The low poll numbers frustrate many Biden advisers, given the relatively strong recent performance of the U.S. economy compared to the rest of the world. But international pollsters say the US is showing particularly clear signs of polarization and unhappiness. The Pew poll found that polarization is sharper in the US than in most other democracies. The Gallup Organization found that the U.S. ranks at or near the bottom for trust in its institutions among wealthy G7 countries.
One of the few things that unites American voters is frustration with their choices this fall’s presidential contesta remnant of the country’s winner-takes-all constitutional system, which naturally devolves into competitions between two major political parties fought in the few states where Electoral College votes are up for grabs.
“I’m angry, but it’s like, what’s the solution to my anger? Who am I going to vote for is a great question because the answer is I really don’t know, to be honest,” said Kenji Takada-Dill, a 30-year-old video editor in Seattle. “We’ve known for a long time that the two-party system doesn’t work. None of the candidates represent my beliefs or my values.”
In Greeley, a city of 112,000 on the Colorado plains about 60 miles northeast of Denver, Otto, a craft store owner, says she’s probably conservative but has long tried to ignore politics . That has proven more difficult since she started using social media to promote her business, where the country’s nasty partisan feuds have leaked into her feeds as she promotes ceramics classes and youth programs.
As she entered the store with her two children, Kristina McGuffey, 41, also lamented the increasing toxicity of American politics.
“I just love the way America was founded, one nation under God,” McGuffey said. “We have become people who, if we don’t get our way, throw a hissy fit.”
___
Riccardi reported from Denver, DeBre from Buenos Aires and Kirka from London. Associated Press writers Gary Fields in Washington, Justin Spike in Budapest and Edna Tarigan in Jakarta contributed to this report.
___
See AP’s coverage of the 2024 global elections here.