NBC News reported at the start of 2024 how it would see more elections than any other year on record, with more than 70 nations covering 4 billion people going to the polls.
Now that all the ballots have been cast and tallied, the trend is unmistakable: In almost all the world’s industrialized countries — and in many developing countries, too — governments’ vote shares decreased.
“It has been a remarkably bad year for incumbents,” said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
This was the first year since records began in 1905 that every incumbent party lost vote share in developed countries holding elections, according to data from ParlGov, an independent database run by the University of Bremen in Germany and first analyzed by the Financial Times newspaper.
Even the exceptions came with caveats: June’s victory for Mexico’s governing party came after a string of more than a dozen incumbent defeats in Latin America; and Ireland’s government was re-elected in November despite its support diminishing slightly.
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The pandemic snarled global supply chains, hiking prices that remain stubbornly high. At the same time, governments pumped money into their limping economies, which some economists say fueled inflation. Hardly helping was the general declining trust and satisfaction with public institutions, and even evidence of a collective growing unhappiness, worldwide.
The Pew Research Center highlighted the “extent of global economic gloom,” with polling this month finding that 64% of adults across 34 countries thought their countries’ finances were in bad shape.
