Political scientists are obsessed with trying to understand the socio-political world we live in. Oftentimes, they emulate natural scientists, occupied with finding common patterns in seemingly unrelated phenomena.
Such generalisations are a risky endeavour; they involve making inferences that go beyond the direct information available, allowing them to apply the findings to a broader range of situations. The political world is messy and often too nuanced to be boxed into such neat framing. Yet sometimes the political world surprises us, defying all concerns, showing us such clearcut, neat patterns that leave within their wake a sense of awe and intellectual curiosity.
The year 2024 was such a year. As we go deeper into 2025 and see the political world unravel around us, it’s perhaps pertinent that we take a look back at 2024, not just an election year, but rather ‘the election year’. The political events of 2024 will shape the political, social and economic realms in many countries around the world for years to come.
It was the biggest election year in human history and saw half of the world’s population — approximately 3.7 billion people — head to the polls in elections in more than 70 countries (as well as the EU). Despite the different contextual circumstances of these countries, perhaps what united most of them was the outcome. Essentially, 2024 was a year that saw a ‘great replacement’ — incumbents and traditional political parties in most countries found themselves on the losing end while snubbed in others.
As an analyst put it, as the year went on, we could clearly see that the year of the election slowly became ‘the bonfire of the incumbents’. How true is this dramatic assertion? The greatest manifestation of this is the US which saw Kamala Harris, candidate of the Democratic Party, lose the bid to presidential power. Remarkably, Donald Trump was able to clinch not only the presidency, but also won majorities both in the House of Representatives and the Senate and was able to sweep all seven swing states.
In the UK, Keir Starmer of the Labour Party won an overwhelming parliamentary majority, defeating the incumbent prime minister Rishi Sunak and bringing a dramatic end to fourteen years of Conservative Party rule. In Botswana, Duma Boko of the Umbrella for Democratic Change defeated the incumbent Mokgweetsi Masisi of the Botswana Democratic Party, bringing a dramatic end to nearly 60 years of the party’s rule. In South Africa, the ruling African National Party lost its majority for the first time since the end of apartheid.
Similarly, in Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party which has been in power almost continuously since 1955, lost its majority along with its coalition partner, Komeito. Perhaps most fascinating for me was the outcome in India, which saw incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party winning a third term but failing to achieve a parliamentary majority and being forced into a coalition agreement. This result is rather remarkable for an incumbent head bent on using divisive and racist rhetoric to amass popular support.
This remarkable global trend begs the question: why have incumbents around the world been punished and whether it really is a trend? What unites most of our selected cases is the general sense of dissatisfaction over the economy. A survey by the Pew Research Centre confirmed this sense of economic pessimism all over the world. Across the 34 countries surveyed, a median of 64 per cent of adults thought that their economy was faring poorly. In the large number of countries that went to the polls in 2024, more than seven in ten held this belief.
Economic grievances, largely a result of the economic problems of the past two decades, from financial crises and the Great Recession of years past to the Covid-19 economic slump, inflation, lack of good jobs and growing income inequality, had contributed to a sense of economic doom all these years. This growing voter discontent proved decisive and led to the incumbents being punished in the 2024 elections.
Any explanation of this global pattern would be rather incomplete without shedding light on the increased salience of the far right in most countries around the world. People all over express a sense of disillusionment with the very institutions and functioning of representative democracy. As the disaffection with mainstream politics and parties grows, parties on the extreme fringes, but especially on the right, have risen to take charge. They have exploited the general feeling of economic anxiety and gained ground by capitalising on and creating divisions over issues of race, gender, migration, crime and nationality.
The greatest manifestation of this is in Germany, where the Alternative for Germany (AFD) has managed to win the Eastern state of Thuringia in the 2024 state election and gained substantial ground in the 2025 general election, becoming the first far-right party to win a state election since World War Two. The inability of mainstream parties to provide a viable policy alternative and their co-option of a right-wing agenda themselves in many places has also not helped matters.
Any good social scientist would acknowledge that there have been exceptions to this general trend. Countries like Mexico, Ireland, El Salvador, and Moldova have been outliers where incumbents, incumbent parties or candidates endorsed by them have been able to avoid the ‘incumbent’s curse’. For instance, in Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum became president with the backing of her predecessor while in Ireland, the centre-right parties Fianna Fail and Fine Gael were re-elected with only a 0.4 points fall in first preference votes to 42.7 per cent. Yet, in recent years, both countries have also experienced positive economic performance relative to other countries.
This general trend against incumbents around the globe begs the question: is this trend mainly a 2024 phenomenon? Evidence suggests that this outcome has been years in the making, the anger and disaffection brewing among the masses for some time. Voter discontent over the financial crisis of 2007-8, poor governance during the Covid pandemic, inflationary pressures, stagnant or declining incomes, and a lack of jobs meant that incumbents have been performing badly in elections for some years.
According to Steven Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard University, since the pandemic struck in 2020, incumbents have been replaced in 41 out of 55 national elections in Western democracies and much of the non-democratic world. However, given the large number of countries going to elections this year, the electoral outcomes that have been punitive to incumbents have epitomised the sense and scale of voter disaffection all around the globe.
As the political world unravels around us in 2025 and more countries head to the polls, it becomes even more pertinent to address the sense of alienation and anger that led to the past year showing us ‘the great replacement’ of incumbents almost everywhere. It is perhaps even more fundamental to work on repairing the fraying bond between the governments and the governed and provide a countervailing influence to the extreme rhetoric that has become electorally institutionalised in many countries this year.
It is only by ensuring faith in democratic institutions and their ability to address people’s grievances that we can prevent another 2024.
The writer is a graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science and former president of the LSESU Women in Politics Society. She can be reached at: https://www.maheenrasul.com