by Ian Bremmer in Time Magazine: With so many elections in big countries this year, it’s a good time to look at how the politics of democracies are shifting. But this is no simple turn to the left or right. In France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally scored big gains in the first round of this year’s legislative elections, but it was an alliance of leftist parties that surged in the second round. In Britain, the center-left Labour Party won a landslide victory over the center-right Conservatives. In Germany, the U.S., and Canada, it’s the right that registers major gains in current polling.
If we look deeper than ideological labels—and beyond voters in Europe and the United States—an undeniable trend comes into focus: Voters are fed up with incumbents. In India, the party of still-popular Prime Minister Narendra Modi expected an easy win with a record number of parliamentary seats earlier this year. Instead, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party lost its parliamentary majority and must rely on partners in other parties to continue his reforms. In South Africa, the African National Congress lost its majority for the first time in the country’s post-apartheid history, falling from 57.9% of the vote in 2019 to a stunning 40.2% this year. To form a government, the humbled ANC has been forced to turn to the Democratic Alliance, its main opposition.
In short, the global democratic trend this year is a resounding rejection of the status quo. French elections were less a victory for the left or right than a noisy repudiation of the center—namely, the increasingly unpopular President Emmanuel Macron. In the U.K., voters handed victory to Labour not because new PM Keir Starmer’s party made a compelling case for a specific set of reforms, but because so many British voters rejected the Conservative Party after 14 years in power under five prime ministers.
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