The year 2024 was the largest election year in history with elections in 72 countries involving 3.7 billion voters and touching local, regional and national/federal levels, legislative and executive or a mix of all of these. While it will not steal its thunder, 2025 will also be exhilarating or exhausting from a democratic standpoint, depending on which side you support in the anti-incumbency wave that has swept the world.
I remember Martin Gurri’s book, “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium”, in which he argued that the crisis of confidence in authorities, traditional elites and political parties, and in the democratic systems is downstream of the technological changes in the information sphere. We find it harder than ever not just to agree on common definitions of good, but also on reality itself since our information landscape is constantly re-fragmenting and putting up personalised transborder echo chambers.
If it is true and our current trials are “baked into the cake” of digitalised modernity, then our best chance is to foster democratic resilience within our societies and “ride the tiger” of democracy.
I feel that the 2024 election year has many things to teach us and, as a Romanian, I am eager to sift for some nuggets of general truth that can inform policymakers moving forward.
Firstly, we should avoid the temptation of blaming public rancour and rebelliousness against the establishment as exclusively the result of foreign agitation or hybrid warfare, though these of course have a role to play. It is easy for a rival or even lukewarm friend to instrumentalise internal dissensions to produce not just seismic shifts in political colour or policy, but also mainstream governments less capable of governing.
A noted Romanian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Secretary of the League of Nations, Nicolae Titulescu, once said, “Give me a good internal policy and I will deliver a good foreign policy.”
The causality is obvious, and there is no controversy in the remark that we have seen many recent instances of internal weakness compromising foreign policy strength in Europe, the US and beyond. There are ample factors that can agitate public spirits, from persistent inflation and high energy prices to security woes from failed immigration policies and the general sense that one is not going to be as economically secure as one’s parents.
Famously, American economist Raj Chetty was given access to all Internal Revenue Service data in the US to track social mobility and found that less than 50 per cent of people could expect to live better than their parents.
Populism would not be far behind if the American Dream had become a minority reality. Good government must precede trust in government and communicating the essentials of challenges being faced and how they are addressed is vital to reestablishing the social contract between the government and the governed.
Whether we discuss the floods in Spain, the hurricanes in the US, the unaffordable housing in the UK or the pressure on welfare systems everywhere, bad political results are preceded often by policy failures stretching back decades and by politicians without the will to head them off even at the risk of conflict with the various permanent bureaucracies.
Secondly, we need to, nevertheless, consider that not only foreign rivals but also ideological entrepreneurs and aspiring counter-elites have the incentive and the means to radicalise and alter public opinion on certain issues in the new informational landscape.
People experience news and political discourse through social media, and this is a fact. One does not need to be a genius to invest not-very-significant amounts of money in bot farms for clicks, views, likes or comments to boost certain opinions and create social desirability biases.
Governments are right to want to increase the public’s resistance to these, but endless discussions on media literacy, critical thinking and censorship have more or less failed outside of discrete use cases. I suspect that many governments who would have the capacity to pursue such efforts (not all do) undermine them by trying to keep levers in place to sway public opinion when the situation demands it.
The 2020 pandemic is the prime example of when definitions for what constitutes disinformation and fake news as pronounced by mainstream forces seemed to sometimes change on a whim.
Thirdly, procedures matter, and the public eventually punishes procedural manipulators. While they are called to vote maybe once every four or five years (if not more often in parliamentary democracies), the public understands that there are interest groups much closer to actual power than they are and who can use proceduralism to thwart perceived public mandates – judicial challenges to policy changes, lobbying, boobytrapped legislation and more.
The public is increasingly sophisticated in understanding these mechanisms and sensitive to their use, which accounts for steadily lower public participation in elections and low levels of trust.
Elections have to start mattering again for approaches regarding the public interest. It is not a coincidence that the 2016 Trump phenomenon saw a record number of voters registering for either US party and voting in the primaries and later in the presidential election. They perceived a new stake in the political competition and that their vote might make a difference in the direction of the country.
Fourthly, if you cannot beat them, steal them. Populists are naturally attuned to the evolving consensus in society since they are set up to maximise popularity. If one is afraid of key attitudes and policy shifts from a rising political star, then the best one can do is steal their issue.
Western voters especially are keen to be respectable and do not easily vote for fringe parties. This is why it has taken multiple electoral cycles for populist parties to mature and capture growing parts of the electorate, like the AfD in Germany or the Rassemblement National in France.
British voters, post-Brexit, went right back to vote for Labour and Tories, marking the terminal fall of the UK Independence Party. And it is no coincidence that social democracy is in free fall all over Europe except in Denmark and Sweden, where the mainstream parties have shifted to restrictionism on immigration.
At a certain point, the “cordon sanitaires” of unlikely bedfellows (some more radical than who they are keeping out, if we compare La France Insoumise to RN in France) are destined for failure and are self-defeating in that the constant negative votes rob such governments of legitimacy in the eyes of the public.
I see a future democratic resilience as being the result of several simultaneous pushes:
- A renewed focus on participatory democracy, with a growing membership in parties and ground-level efforts to educate people politically and to give them a stake in the political system;
- Recognise that the world is not as it was the last time that the current elites were young activists and that longstanding policies should change if they have proven to be failures, whether we are discussing immigration, degrowth, too-ambitious green targets or overregulation;
- Reform strategic communications on the government side since too many populist and political crises are the result of communication failures and bankrupt narratives;
- Look at the populists as “canaries in coalmines” and learn from them what the new reality is; and
- Lastly, it is better to coopt rising populists than to wall them off and make them cool and counterculture figures.
We have seen plenty of populist governments in Europe governing in more or less mainstream ways because of the existing constraints. Being in permanent opposition has the perk of never having to take your turn at the hard task of governing and experiencing voter disenchantment.
Italy is the undisputed champion of humbling populists, though one becomes invested in some measure of their success in order to keep the system viable. British anthropologist Ernest Gellner remarked (with reference to the Austro-Hungarian Empire) that political systems last as long as the stage they have designated is the one where every interest fights for itself and where dissent is expressed.
Once political actors or the public are disenchanted enough to not pursue interests through the system, then it is doomed. If this sounds familiar, it is because this is what voter apathy, repugnance with the political class and negative views on the system ultimately lead to.
So long as people are still trying to win elections to reduce immigration or promote some energy source over another, then the system can still be reformed.
What are the main elections for 2025? I count 69 elections this year, many of them in Europe, and all are facing increased stakes because of the challenges that we are facing.
In Europe, Germany’s elections are the “proof in the pudding” for the AfD as a political force and, as usual for the engine of Europe, it will have an outsized impact on European policies for instance with regards to Ukraine.
The Polish Presidential elections will also be interesting, since the current all too familiar rivalry between President Andrzej Duda and the Parliament majority that displaced his own party, PiS, might be resolved.
The Canadian elections will also be important. The recent exit by Justin Trudeau leaves the floor open for a potential conservative takeover riding public discontent with the stagnating economy, with immigration, housing and governmental strong-handed tactics in cases such as the trucker protests.
I am especially interested in the Argentinian legislative elections on 26 October, since President Milei could receive a much friendlier legislature, depending on the economic performance of the country by then, which would enable him to continue his radical reforms.
I did not expect the Greenlandic general election on 6 April to be important, but the resumption of Donald Trump’s rhetoric on securing Greenland for the United States and the strong reaction in Denmark and Greenland, which has begun discussing independence, makes it one of the standout disruptive events of the year.
Australia’s federal election on 8 March will also be interesting, since it faces many of the challenges of the Anglosphere and can therefore serve as a bellwether for political trends elsewhere, for instance in Canada and the UK.
For the MENA region, I am going to follow the Egyptian and Iraqi parliamentary elections. Egypt is not the only country expending enormous resources to move its capital (Indonesia with Nusantara is another) and I am expecting the parliamentary elections to indicate positive or negative political reactions to the ongoing New Administrative Capital investment, which has increased debt levels and enriched insiders. The future stability of Egypt might hang in the balance.
As for Iraq, this will be the first major election since the humbling of Iran and its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah by Israel. The results of the elections will indicate the status of the political fortunes of Iran in the friendliest country in the region. Should the new Prime Minister distance himself from Iranian ties, this will be a strong indication of the ebb of Iranian power for now.
From Sub-Saharan Africa, all elections will be important, but I am especially interested in Tanzania, where the current first female President, Samia Suluhu Hassan, might seek to be elected in her own right (she succeeded President John Magufuli upon his death in 2021). This would give her the mandate to implement wide-ranging reforms than what she has advanced so far, especially since some of her policies conflict with those of her predecessor.
Lastly, I must not forget my own country, Romania, which is undergoing a severe crisis of the political class which has precipitated an institutional crisis, with a cancelled presidential election and another scheduled for the spring of 2025. The stakes are quite high for the country, given the proximity to the war in Ukraine and its reliance on foreign investment for its development.
The proliferation of nationalist/sovereigntist parties and candidates is a marked change from previous years, when it seemed that Romania had been avoided by the populist wave of discontent in the EU, and there is much uncertainty in the air with accusations of Russian influence being flung left and right while the voters’ contempt for the mainstream political forces can only grow.
The World Economic Forum uses several portmanteaus to refer to the current situation in the world: polycrisis, for multiple crises playing out at the same time, and permacrisis, for the long stretches of constant disruption that we are faced with.
2025 promises to be more of the same, especially with the incoming Trump Administration, and therefore the 2025 election year can bring significant changes. In this case, the spectre that is haunting the world is one of uncertainty.
This opinion piece was written by Radu Magdin, a global analyst, consultant, trainer and think tanker. He is the CEO of Smartlink Communications SRL in Bucharest, Romania, and Vice President of the Romanian Chamber of Commerce – Singapore (RoCham).
*Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of NHA – News Hub Asia. 
