By Sam Wilkin, Director of Political Risk Analytics, Willis
For the leaders of the world’s great democracies, 2024’s much-anticipated year of elections was a bit of a catastrophe. On the easiest measure of incumbent performance to assess – whether the governing party gained or lost vote share compared to the most recent prior election – nearly 80% of incumbents facing free and fair elections saw their vote share decline markedly (see map).1
Figure 1: Incumbent vote share performance in free and fair 2024 elections
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, GeoNames, Microsoft, Navinfo, Open Places, OpenStreetMap, Overture Maps Fundation, Tom Tom Zernin
It is a little more difficult to judge the impact of the polls on actual political power. When opposition parties – especially populist parties – made stunning gains, incumbents often built elaborate minority coalitions to keep those rising challengers out of power (as in France, Romania, and South Africa, for instance – although the French effort fell apart in December and had to be rebuilt). Moreover, in some cases the makeup of the next government is not yet clear (as of this writing, negotiations are ongoing in Austria).
But it was undeniably a bad year for incumbents. Ruchir Sharma, chair of Rockefeller International, estimates that in large, developed democracies, incumbents won only 14% of contests. In long-established, wealthy democracies for which data are available back to 1910, incumbents suffered their worst vote share loss in nearly 120 years (only 2009, in the wake of the global financial crisis, was even close).2
That comparison with 2009 offers a hint as to what might have gone wrong. The defenestration of incumbents was not totally unexpected. In our look ahead at 2024’s year of elections, published a year ago, we forecast: “it is not likely to be a good year for incumbents,” because of “the tendency of electorates to vote out incumbents who preside over poor economic performance.”
And that pattern of ‘economic voting’ is the most obvious common thread linking the tendency of voters in disparate locations to cast the world’s most powerful leaders into the “dustbin of history” (to quote Trotsky). This anti-incumbent trend also impacted politically-free countries in the emerging world, including Bhutan, Botswana, Ghana, the parliament of Lithuania, Mauritius, and the presidency of Senegal.
Most countries went to the polls in 2024 having suffered through a period of high inflation; in advanced economies, this was usually the most significant bout of inflation in living memory, and frequently topped voter concerns. In the U.S., for instance, a striking 76% of voters for the victorious opposition challenger Donald Trump said that inflation had been “a severe hardship” for their them and families.
In some ways, though, this story of suffering incumbents was a sideshow. Only 36 national electoral contests were held in countries seen to be politically free; the majority of the 97 national polls of 2024 were held in partly free or unfree countries.
In those polls, incumbents naturally tended to do quite well – more than 85% retained power. In some cases, they needed no campaigning effort at all: scheduled polls in four countries, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, North Korea, and South Sudan, were postponed, sometimes for dubious reasons.
At the beginning of the year, we had warned that these “anocracies” – where political power is contested, but not by free and fair elections – are the most likely to become severely unstable. By midyear, this prediction looked unwise. Polls in Iran and Russia had passed off largely without incident. Contests in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Chad, Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritania, and Venezuela had triggered protests, but governments were still comfortably in power, sometimes amidst severe repression.
Then, in August, protestors brought down the government of Bangladesh (which had swept the country’s January election after the opposition boycotted the poll). As we reached year end, mass protests against unpopular re-elected regimes suddenly became a theme, afflicting Georgia, Mozambique, and Pakistan.
Surprisingly, and contrary to our expectation, such protests were also a theme in several politically-free countries. Slovakia was the early warning, where intense protests against the policies of Prime Minister Robert Fico (and a presidential election victory for his close ally Peter Pellegrini) were followed by a shocking assassination attempt against Fico. In France and Austria, there were protests against the possibility of right-populist parties coming to power following major gains for those parties in elections.
But the two most stunning cases occurred in the politically-free emerging market democracies of Romania and South Korea. ‘Emerging market' is a misnomer in South Korea’s case – the country is now richer than Japan on a per capita basis. Yet South Korea’s president, facing off against an obstructionist opposition-controlled legislature in the wake of elections, attempted to impose martial law. Following this seeming coup attempt, he was impeached (on the second try). Meanwhile, EU member state Romania annulled the first-round result for its presidential election, alleging Russian interference.
Although protests in such politically-free countries are less likely to be violent, turmoil can be a serious concern for business, because in these countries, the urban concentrations of value that can be disrupted by civil unrest are extremely high.
Even if some of these trends could have been anticipated, it was shocking to see 2024’s year of elections play out as it did – especially the global ousting of incumbents, and instability in politically-free countries. Today, newspaper columnists have a knee-jerk tendency to forecast doom for any government facing re-election, based solely on the strength of economic voting trends. Never has the maxim that ‘all politics is local’ been so challenged.
But there were some countries that bucked the global trends. There were unfree regimes where incumbent parties actually lost at the polls, albeit only three – the first was Iran, where a reformist presidential candidate triumphed for the first time in many years; the second the Maldives; and the third was Sri Lanka, where despite restrictions on political freedom a Marxist party enjoyed a sweeping victory in the wake of a sovereign debt crisis.
There were also a handful of reasonably free and fair polls where the incumbent political party prospered. Governments of some small island nations did well, including the Dominican Republic, San Marino, and the Solomon Islands. Among the big emerging markets, left-leaning Mexico was the star, with big gains for the incumbent party’s vote share in the presidency and both houses of the legislature. At the beginning of 2024, the ruling party in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracy, enjoyed a win with the election of the outgoing president’s hand-picked successor.
On the map, it looks as if Bulgaria’s incumbent party gained, but that is a bit misleading – the country had two elections in 2024, and a total of six since 2021, owing to an ongoing political crisis created by the inability of the largest parties to form a stable coalition government - another case of turmoil in a politically-free country.
Turning to advanced economies, the European Union was an unexpected winner. Both before and after the EU elections, the headlines were about the rise of the populist right. But in fact, the governing European People's Party, led by Ursula von der Leyen, gained in the polls – if only by a single seat.
In 2024’s year of elections, that counted as a win.
1 Even this measure is complicated because in some cases the executive and legislative vote shares moved in opposite directions. To skirt this issue we considered each executive and legislative election as a separate poll, producing a final count of 94 national elections in 2024. The map and statistics in this article, unless otherwise noted, are based on analysis by WTW using ChatGPT 4o to summarize media coverage. Election lists were obtained from the American University global elections tracker, https://www.american.edu/sis/global-election-tracker.cfm, and International IDEA, https://www.idea.int/initiatives/the-2024-global-elections-supercycle. For multi-round and run-off elections, only the final round was counted. Polls where the incumbent was not affiliated with a political party and did not run again were excluded from consideration.
2 https://www.ft.com/content/e8ac09ea-c300-4249-af7d-109003afb893 The average vote share loss in 2024 was nearly 8%; in 2009 it was nearly 6%; in other years, 4% at most.
