2024 was a unique year in human history, as nearly half of the world’s population had presidential, parliamentary, snap, and local elections. Some countries that had elections were India, Pakistan, France, Iran, Indonesia, Mexico, and the U.K. There is a common outcome in many of these elections: the ruling party (incumbent) lost. 

In July 2024, the incumbent party of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), did not win a majority in the 2024 general elections. In the lower house (known as the Lok Sabha), the BJP only got 240/543, below the 272 seats needed for a majority.

Even though the BJP was able to form a government by forming a coalition alliance with other parties, giving Modi his third term as PM, it nevertheless came as a surprise as the BJP was expected to win a landslide majority like the 2014 and 2019 general elections. 

In South Africa, the African National Congress—Nelson Mandela’s party that played a pivotal role in ending the apartheid regime—lost its 30-year majority, receiving only 40% of the votes in parliament. In South Korea, the opposition party won a landslide majority in the country’s April 2024 parliamentary elections, while the incumbent party got the second-most seats.

In France, the incumbent party of President Emmanuel Macron lost in the snap parliamentary elections. (A snap election is an election that occurs before the next scheduled election after a prime minister/president dissolves parliament).

However, the New Popular Front, which is a coalition of all the leftist parties, won a majority of 182 seats, followed by Macron’s centrist coalition. In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party (U.K.’s main left-wing party) defeated the incumbent Tory (conservative party), putting Labour back in government after 14 years. 

In Japan, the incumbent Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lost its majority in the October 2024 snap parliamentary elections, putting the country in political chaos for some time. This defeat was remarkable, as the LDP dominated Japanese politics for much of the country’s recent history. 

Notably, on November 5, 2024, Americans reelected Donald Trump as the next president of the U.S., while the incumbent Democratic party was defeated. Trump is the second president in American history to serve a nonconsecutive second term after Grover Cleveland.

What the elections in India, South Africa, Japan, South Korea, the U.S., and elsewhere had in common was that a rise in prices and economic anxiety drove the incumbents to defeat. The Covid-19 pandemic led to inflation due to the shock of supply chains that created high prices.

As a result, the ruling parties are associated with the cause of the economic crisis, making voters elect whichever party is not in charge. Thus, had the republican party been in charge for the past four years, they would likely have been defeated by the Democrats. 

While the post-pandemic inflation was the immediate cause, the longer-term cause was a general movement against the “establishment,” better known as the rise of populist politics. 

This trend does not necessarily mean the rise of right-wing populist and quasi-authoritarian governments worldwide, as was insisted ever since the election of Trump in 2016. In fact, as the recent elections in France, the U.K., South Korea, and elsewhere show, it was the left that won. 

Instead, the core cause is that many individuals worldwide are finding that the current approach of neoliberal economics, which is greater privatization of the economy, is not working for many people. As a result, a typical response to dissatisfaction with the status quo is populist politics, whether on the left or right. Thus, if the structural problems are ignored or unresolved by “the establishment,” populist candidates will continue to exist. 

Simply electing the other party will not fix any of these economic problems. However, the fall of incumbent parties should be welcomed as a symbol of a vibrant democracy in which any party, even the ones that have ruled the country for over 30 years, can be defeated by the people.