It was the year of elections. More than a billion adults went to the polls in 2024, including in the United States, India, Brazil, the United Kingdom and the 27 member states of the European Union. The results revealed angry electorates. They confirmed a historic wave of removing incumbents and corroborated a worrying phenomenon: the fading of the “center” (left or right) and the continuing rise of protest movements (on the right and the left). 2025 will not be the year of democratic recovery.
Optimists will say that holding elections, even in the most closed autocracies, is in itself a testament to democracy. In 2024, “of the 60 countries that have held national elections, 31 are autocracies,” Staffan Ingemar Lindberg, director of the Swedish Varieties of Democracy Institute, recently told Le Monde. Even if it is purely formal, the ballot box serves as a form of legitimacy at home and on the international stage.
In places where democracy was taking on an “illiberal” character – relatively free elections but the separation of powers on the way out – 2024 brought a few pleasant surprises. In India, Brazil and Poland, for example, voters halted, slowed or tempered the underlying trend observed since 2000: the steady decline in the number of democracies in favor of the rise of the autocratic or illiberal model.
Where liberal democracy is deeply entrenched, often for nearly two centuries, the picture is mixed. The election of Donald Trump in the US is in itself an assault on American democratic practice. A felon, convicted of fraud and tax evasion and accused of attempting to overturn the outcome of the November 2020 election by force, the father of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement – the ultranationalist successor to the old Republican Party – would never have been eligible in November 2024 had it not been for the emergence of practices contrary to the spirit, if not the letter, of the Constitution: the politicization of the judiciary, the illiberal drift of the Republican Party, the ideological polarization annihilating the practice of democratic compromise. Is the US on the road to “illiberal” democracy? 2025 will provide the beginnings of an answer.
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