The Year of Anti-Incumbency – 2024 Elections In Retrospect

2024: 3.7 billion voters, 72 elections.

As the largest global election year in human history nears its conclusion, it is imperative to reflect on the issues and trends influencing the world’s political, social and economic landscape.

In January this year, the team at Nexus APAC compiled a geopolitical timeline to track each election. In this retrospective series, Nexus APAC Analyst Adelaide Hayes explores three key themes of the ‘super election year’, and how they are shaping modern democracies.

Part 1 of the series will address the global wave of anti-incumbency, including its causes, regional outcomes, rare exceptions, and implications.

Anti-incumbent sentiments, rooted in global economic realities

During her address to the National Press Club of Australia, attended by the Nexus APAC team earlier this week, Caroline Kennedy, the United States Ambassador to Australia, partially attributed the United States presidential election outcome to a phenomenon known as “a wave of anti-incumbency.”

Whilst domestic media outlets tend to maintain a granular focus on candidates’ policy agendas and campaign strategies to assess election outcomes, perceiving elections from a global point of view elucidates a worldwide trend: anti-incumbency is a plausible explanation for many of this year’s election results.

Incumbent parties across ideological lines have uniformly suffered setbacks or losses in 2024.

According to Mr Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University, incumbents have been removed from office in 40 of 54 elections in Western democracies since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 (as of November 2024).

It begs the question: why is voter dissatisfaction so prominent?

Some argue that lingering inflation in the aftermath of the pandemic has created an ‘electoral long COVID’. Since 2020, countries worldwide have experienced rising prices and attendant global supply chain disruptions. Take the price of eggs in Australia, green onions in Indonesia, motor fuel in the United States, and higher electricity bills across Europe, for example. Rises in the cost of basic necessities have hit the living standards of households across the world. Furthermore, pandemic aftershocks caused by disruptions to education and workplace experiences are continuing to negatively impact wellbeing.

Moreover, billions of people voting this year are living in an economically and socially unequal world. Inequality breeds a lack of trust in government. According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 1 in 2 people feel that they are not in control of their lives and 2 out of 3 people believe their voice is not heard in their political system.

A Global Snapshot

In African countries with a Democracy Index score of 5.00 or higher, the pattern of incumbents suffering losses held: as illustrated in Botswana, Senegal, South Africa and Mauritius (with Madagascar as the sole exception).  In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since the end of Apartheid in 1994.

In the Pacific, incumbents succumbed to their opponents in Tuvalu and the Solomon Islands, whereas Papua New Guinea, Kiribati and Palau resisted the wave. Notably, the region’s democratic institutions are still developing. Women are under-represented as both candidates and voters. Elections frequently focus on sentiments surrounding allegiances with China, the United States and Australia.

The anti-incumbent wave was highly prominent in Europe, where voters delivered rebukes to almost every incumbent government up for re-election. In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party gained power for the first time in 14 years. In France, centrist President Emanuel Macron appointed liberal-conservative Prime Minister Michael Barnier, after the President’s Renaissance party lost a majority. Incumbent parties either lost outright or suffered losses in vote share in Portugal, Belgium, Austria, Croatia, Bulgaria, Czechia, Slovakia and Lithuania.

The Americas saw mixed results: incumbents were denied re-election in the United States and Panama, whereas parties retained government in Mexico and the Dominican Republic. Whilst the American candidate Vice-President Kamala Harris’ loss to President Donald Trump was larger than anticipated, the Democratic Party endured one of the smallest losses in vote share of all incumbent parties in higher-income countries with elections in 2024.

Asia saw a series of electoral upsets, even in nations where incumbent parties retained government. For example, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, which has governed almost continuously since 1955, lost its parliamentary majority in the powerful lower house for the first time in 15 years. In South Korea, President Yoon Suk Yeol received the lowest support for a ruling president’s party in the nation’s democratic era. Indonesia, an unusual example, saw the popular outgoing president support a candidate from an opposing party instead of his own.

The Exceptions

2024 also saw some significant exceptions to the wave of anti-incumbency. The obvious cases occurred in nations where elections are neither fair nor free. For example, President Vladimir Putin won 87.8% of the vote in Russia’s presidential election (the highest-ever result in Russia’s post-Soviet history). Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame won 99% of the vote to add a fourth term to his already 24-year tenure.

There have been major standouts. Prime Minister Narendra Modi won the world’s biggest election in history as an incumbent, despite soaring inflation rates in India. Some commentators attribute this to the notion that Prime Minister Modi is perceived as an outsider to the world of political elites. Others note the intensified and organised campaign efforts of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Nonetheless, Prime Minister Modi is being forced to govern in coalition for the first time in more than two decades due to losses in vote share.

Additionally, Mexico bucked the anti-incumbent wave in electing President Claudia Sheinbaum, a member of former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s MORENA. This may be attributable to the fact that, unlike many other countries, voters in Mexico reported satisfaction with economic conditions in the lead-up to the election.

Moldova’s presidential election saw incumbent President Maia Sandu win re-election. Uniquely, Moldova’s elections primarily consist of single-issue voters – electing either based on a Pro-European or Pro-Russian sentiment.

What does this mean for incumbents in 2025?

Peaceful, fair transitions of power are a sign of a healthy democracy and a voter base that holds governments to account. Healthy democracies also reward governments that succeed.

Incumbents seeking re-election in 2025, including the Australian Labor Party (ALP), must learn to concisely and convincingly communicate the realities of inflation to their constituents.

Without a nuanced understanding of the global and persisting economic causes of cost-of-living crises, voters are likely to blame the government of the day for their personal financial positions.

When elections devolve into indiscriminate, predetermined outbursts of discontent, governments are left with no clear understanding of public desires or standards of governance, nor with incentives to meet them.

The 2025 election agenda is significant in its own right. Voters in Canada, Germany, Australia, Chile, the Philippines and Ecuador will head to the polls, for example.

Should the wave of anti-incumbency persist throughout next year and beyond, outcomes once characterised as typical campaign failures and victories may morph into signs of underlying democratic dysfunction.

In the next edition of Nexus APAC Insights, we will explore another key theme of the 2024 ‘super election year’ – mis- and disinformation. What do these concepts mean? How prominent were they in 2024? What can governments do about them?