Elections to Watch in 2024

But 2024 will see a global battle between democracy and autocracy play out literally, at the polls. And not just in the United States, which will hold its first presidential election since a deadly right-wing insurrection sought to block Biden from taking office three years ago: Seven of the world’s 10 most populous countries are expected to vote on national leadership this year.

These countries range from flawed democracies to hybrid regimes to autocracies. India, a flawed democracy, has been governed for nearly 10 years by Hindu-nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has expanded his power base by repressing minorities and restricting freedom of expression. Neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh—as well as nearby Indonesia—are also struggling to break free of domineering political personality cults.

Russia, an autocracy whose elections are neither free nor fair, will almost certainly rubber-stamp another term for Russian President Vladimir Putin after he signed into law constitutional amendments that reset his term limits. And in the Western Hemisphere, the United States and Mexico will elect presidents who could usher in continuity or rupture the countries’ critical bilateral relationship.

A long list of middle powers and small states are slated to hold elections this year, too. Among them are El Salvador, Iran, Senegal, South Africa, Taiwan, Tunisia, the United Kingdom, and Venezuela.

In total, more than 40 percent of the planet’s population is expected to cast ballots in more than 50 national contests. (Dozens of other countries will vote in municipal, regional, and supranational elections, including to select members of the European Parliament.) The most democratic country to head to the polls, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, is Iceland; the least democratic one is North Korea. Neither one will hold much sway over global affairs.

Certain themes course through many of these contests. In Bangladesh, El Salvador, India, Russia, and Tunisia, leaders with astronomical approval ratings but dubious democratic credentials will attempt to hold on to power; in Indonesia and Mexico, divisive figureheads cannot run for reelection but have gone to painstaking lengths to anoint loyal successors. (Senegal and Taiwan are the only other countries guaranteed new leadership.) Voters in South Africa and the United Kingdom are frustrated with incumbent parties but feel they have few good alternatives.

With so many countries voting, international relations are also on the ballot. In addition to U.S.-Mexico ties, concurrent elections in Taipei and Washington could hold great sway over the future of U.S.-China competition in the Indo-Pacific. If, how, and when Venezuela’s expected vote is held will also impact whether the United States continues to saddle Caracas with sanctions.

The European Union, for its part, has sought to woo Tunisia with money to stem migration across the Mediterranean—a deal that is controversial on both sides and could be ruptured by future leadership. And a slew of proudly nonaligned countries—among them Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and South Africa—will see their convictions tested in an increasingly bipolar world.

---

National Elections Planned in 2024

Hover or click for more information on each election.

View on desktop for interactive map.

---

More people than ever before will vote this year. But, as Biden himself knows all too well, free and undisputed outcomes are no guarantee. In perhaps the most worrying throughline, incumbents in the majority of the countries we’ve featured here have sought to weaken opposition figures with political bans or jail time—or both.

The United States’ elections will be pivotal for the world, but they will also be the most closely watched. Here are 15 other presidential and parliamentary contests to keep on your radar—14 national votes plus the European Parliament’s 27-country bonanza.

---

JANUARY 7

Opposition Protests Are a Mainstay in Booming Bangladesh

FP’s roundup last year included Bangladesh, the South Asian country with a population of around 170 million people that was slated to hold parliamentary elections by January 2024. Most observers expected these elections to occur before the end of 2023. But in November last year, Bangladeshi authorities announced the vote would be held one week into the new year, on Jan. 7.

Though a date has finally been set, a legitimate election is anything but a guarantee. That’s because Bangladesh’s opposition is vowing to boycott the contest if sitting Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who has governed since 2009 as the head of the left-leaning Awami League, doesn’t step down and appoint an interim government to oversee the vote.

Hasina has served three consecutive five-year terms. The opposition, led by the conservative Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), is concerned the Awami League could rig the Jan. 7 vote to secure Hasina a fourth. Their worry is well-founded: Bangladesh’s most recent general elections, in 2018, saw the Awami League earn 96 percent of the national vote, a result the opposition called “farcical” and that Human Rights Watch warned came with “serious allegations of abuses” including voter intimidation and vote rigging. (The BNP boycotted the election before that, in 2014, for similar reasons.)

In the 2018 election, the Awami League won almost all of the 300 directly elected seats in Bangladesh’s 350-member parliament, while the BNP scored just seven. The 50 remaining seats are allotted to women through a unique quota system. All the seats will be up for grabs again this year. The BNP-led opposition bloc also includes Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami and other small parties.

Starting in late 2022, Bangladesh became engulfed in opposition-led protests demanding Hasina’s resignation. The demonstrations have continued—the only difference is that the number of arrests, detentions, injuries, and deaths has risen. Last year, Human Rights Watch reported that authorities had arrested nearly 10,000 opposition activists after a canceled October BNP rally; at least 16 had been killed and more than 5,500 injured in ongoing violence.

As FP’s Michael Kugelman, the author of South Asia Brief, underscored in a January 2023 podcast, these protests do not represent a marked new surge in discontent with Hasina or her party. Rather, Kugelman said issues such as spiking inflation and economic insecurity have been “exploited by the opposition” to heighten existing political polarization in an already-divided Bangladesh. “[Y]ou don’t have people across the board coming out into the streets,” he continued. “Those that don’t belong to the opposition either are apathetic or focus on other things …. In many cases, they still see reason to support the government.”

Many of the government’s backers tout its robust economic record. Though the Bangladeshi economy has come under recent difficulty due to the political unrest, larger macroeconomic trends are hard to refute.

Once a deeply impoverished country—derided as a “basket case” by the late U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—“Bangladesh is now a boomtown,” journalist Ahmede Hussain wrote in Foreign Policy in August 2023. It boasts the fastest-growing economy in the Indo-Pacific and is poised to exit the United Nations’ Least Developed Countries list by 2026. Hasina has presided over rapid improvements in human development and the standard of living; the country’s per capita gross domestic product is now higher than those in neighboring India and Pakistan.

But “alongside economic growth has come the crumbling of democracy,” Hussain added in his article last year, as Hasina has ruled with an “iron fist.” Hasina’s chief rival, BNP head—and former prime minister—Khaleda Zia, was jailed in 2018 on corruption charges that most observers consider to be politically motivated. In 2022, then-U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet warned of “narrowing civic space, increased surveillance, intimidation and reprisals” in Bangladesh and urged the government to investigate allegations of forced disappearances.

The United States has also become more assertive about the situation in Bangladesh. Washington views the nonaligned government in Dhaka, the country’s capital, as an increasingly important player in U.S.-China competition, as well as a partner in containing more local crises such as in Myanmar. In December 2021, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned the counterterrorism paramilitary unit of the Bangladesh Police in response to allegations of serious human rights abuse. In May 2023, the U.S. State Department announced a new policy to “restrict the issuance of visas for any Bangladeshi individual, believed to be responsible for, or complicit in, undermining the democratic election process in Bangladesh.”

Last October, the U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh, Peter Haas, sought to compel the Awami League and opposition to engage in dialogue—a prospect Hasina rejected. “Any action that undermines the democratic elections process—including violence, preventing people from exercising their right to peaceful assembly, and internet access—calls into question the ability to conduct free and fair elections,” Haas said, as reported in Benar News. In the months following, Haas faced repeated death threats from members of the Awami League.

For the Jan. 7 elections to have any hope of being free and fair, Hasina would—however improbably—have to step down to thwart the opposition’s threatened boycott. This is unlikely, as neither the Awami League nor the BNP have clear programs beyond their respective cults of personality. Hasina and Zia hail from families that have ruled Bangladesh since it gained independence from Pakistan 51 years ago and are effectively “dynastic matriarchs,” Charlie Campbell wrote in a recent Time profile of Hasina.

The big question is “what happens after the election,” as “unrest and violence are possible” if broad swaths of the population consider the vote to be illegitimate, Kugelman wrote in an email. Though the Awami League and BNP seem uninterested in exploring new leadership and finding a way out of the present impasse, Hasina and Zia—76 and 78 years old, respectively—cannot remain on the political scene forever. Whenever Bangladesh moves on to new leadership, the country will be in uncharted territory.

Return to Full List

---

JANUARY 13

Taiwan Faces a Stark Choice on China

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, many Taiwanese were forced to grapple more seriously with a longstanding fear of their own: What if China invades Taiwan?

In 1949, after Mao Zedong’s Communist Party took over the mainland, the island of Taiwan became an outpost of exiled Chinese nationalists under leader Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang declared the government in Taiwan, known formally as the Republic of China, to be the only legitimate government of China, opposite its rivals in Beijing. Initially, much of the West—and most significantly, the United States—concurred. The Taiwanese government in Taipei became a key ally of Washington’s in the Cold War and occupied China’s seat on the United Nations Security Council.

But things changed in 1979, when the United States shifted its recognition from Taipei to Beijing after years of diplomacy that began with then-U.S. President Richard Nixon’s landmark 1972 visit to China. With this adjustment, Washington developed a policy of strategic ambiguity toward Taiwan that exists to this day. Under the “one China” doctrine, Washington acknowledges that Beijing believes Taiwan is part of China but does not formally accept that position. In practice, the United States diplomatically recognizes only the People’s Republic of China—but maintains close ties with Taiwan and has become its de facto security guarantor. As FP’s Matthew Kroenig summarized in July 2022, “[t]he United States has said that it would be opposed to both Taiwan declaring independence and to a Chinese attack on the island.”

Taiwan’s future is a flash point of heightened U.S.-China competition. China views Taiwan as a renegade province and is keen to reunify. Today, the two territories have a degree of relations with one another and are also economically interdependent. But Beijing routinely intimidates Taipei with military exercises in the Taiwan Strait that have intensified in recent years. Beijing tends to escalate when it perceives the “one China” norm as having been breached—such as in 2022, when then-U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi became the first high-ranking official to visit Taiwan in 25 years.

The Taiwanese people are split on the question of how to resolve their island’s political status. Many initially sought some sort of eventual reunification with China but have been turned off by the mainland’s uptick in repression. The fate of Hong Kong has shown some Taiwanese that the promise of “one country, two systems” is, in their eyes, a farce. A majority of Taiwan’s inhabitants now identify as distinctly Taiwanese, even though 90 percent trace their ethnic origins to mainland China. (Taiwan is also home to an often-overlooked Indigenous population.)

While many Taiwanese desire total independence in theory, realpolitik has ruled that out. The status of Taiwan is so sensitive that in 2005 Beijing passed an anti-secession law that allows China to use military force against Taiwan if the island declares itself an independent state. Whether, and to what extent, Washington would come to Taipei’s aid in a Taiwan-China conflict is thus a subject of considerable debate across the Indo-Pacific—and in the halls of the U.S. Congress.

This issue is also driving Taiwan’s ongoing presidential campaign, which will culminate in elections on Jan. 13. Incumbent Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, who heads the center-left Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), has run up against term limits and cannot seek reelection. Her party emerged out of a pro-democracy movement that sought an end to a one-party dictatorship in Taiwan under Chiang’s Kuomintang party (KMT). Since the island lifted martial law in 1987 and democratized in the early 1990s, the DPP and KMT have been the two main forces in Taipei.

Today’s democratic KMT traffics mostly in center-right politics. Though the DPP and KMT differ significantly on social issues—Tsai’s DPP, for example, helped legalize same-sex marriage in Taiwan—their biggest divergence is on China. Though each party’s position is nuanced, the KMT generally desires closer ties to China—and possible reunification talks of some kind—while the DPP sees Taiwan as an independent country and has sought to draw closer to Washington. Tsai visited the United States last year, on a stopover including a meeting with then-U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy that Beijing vowed to “fight”; meanwhile, a former KMT president became the first Taiwanese leader to travel to the Chinese mainland since 1949.

Though Tsai has more authoritatively sought to bolster Taiwan’s ties with the United States, the island has been losing ground in its long battle for global recognition. Today, only 13 countries recognize Taipei as opposed to Beijing. Taiwan initially found much of its global support in Latin America, but the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama have all switched their alliances from Taipei to Beijing since mid-2017, as Leland Lazarus of Florida International University and Ryan C. Berg of the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted in Foreign Policy last year. The Solomon Islands had done the same, Lazarus and Berg wrote. Taiwan’s growing diplomatic isolation, driven chiefly by countries’ economic interest in the mainland, has only heightened Taipei’s fears of a potentially militant Beijing.

Tsai’s vice-president, Lai Ching-te, has secured the DPP’s presidential nomination and is vowing continuity. Like Tsai, he is disliked by China and maintains that Taiwan is already independent, skirting the thorny subject of an official declaration of independence. The KMT’s nominee, Hou Yu-ih, is the mayor of New Taipei—the area surrounding the capital—and seeks talks with China to calm tensions. The two are joined by a third-party candidate representing the relatively new Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). That group’s nominee, Ko Wen-je, does not have a clear position on China and has sought mostly to appeal to voters’ domestic concerns about energy security, housing, and the economy. (Taiwan recently weathered a recession.)

To win the presidency, a candidate needs only a plurality of the popular vote. Current polling shows Lai with a slight lead over Hou, while Ko trails far behind. (Hou and Ko tried—and failed—to form a united opposition coalition to challenge the DPP.) In a Dec. 19 survey cited by the Economist, 34 percent of voters said they intended to cast their ballots for Lai, with 31 percent backing Hou and 21 percent indicating Ko as their preference. Lai’s lead has narrowed considerably in recent weeks as Jan. 13 approaches.

The same day, Taiwanese voters will also elect members of Taiwan’s unicameral parliament, the 113-seat Legislative Yuan, via a mixed-member proportional system. Seventy-three legislators will be elected directly by their constituencies while 34 will gain their seats through party-based proportional representation. The remaining six seats are reserved for Indigenous communities. Parties must pass a 5 percent threshold to enter parliament.

Taiwan’s next president, guaranteed to be a newcomer, will need a cooperative parliament to make his agenda a reality. Whether or not he brings decisive policy change, that leader will be in the global spotlight—for better or for worse.

Return to Full List

---

FEBRUARY 4

Can Anything Stop El Salvador’s Bitcoin-Loving, Backsliding Leader?

El Salvador is a tiny country. But its president is at the forefront of pioneering what writer Ryan Broderick called “hustle-bro populism” in a July 2021 article for Foreign Policy.

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele was elected in 2019 as a political disruptor. The grandson of Palestinian immigrants and former mayor of the country’s capital, San Salvador, Bukele promised an end to the divisions that had plagued El Salvador since its 1979-92 civil war. His youth helped market his presidency as an opportunity for a fresh start: At 37, he became the youngest head of state in Latin America and the region’s first millennial leader. His freshly founded New Ideas party ended 30 years of two-party control in the country, which had previously alternated between the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and leftist former guerilla group Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the latter of which Bukele was once a member.

El Salvador once held the unsavory title of having the highest per capita murder rate in the world. Bukele has brought that figure down precipitously—but not without controversy. The president is thought to have inked a deal with the country’s two biggest gangs, MS-13 and Barrio 18, shortly after taking office in 2019, FP’s Catherine Osborn reported in Latin America Brief in April 2022. (Such government-gang negotiations are not uncommon in the region.) Yet after El Salvador experienced a bloody three-day period that March, most observers assumed the Bukele-gang agreement had crumbled.

In the almost two years since, Bukele has instituted a zero-tolerance policy toward crime that has seen his popularity soar and El Salvador’s human rights indicators plummet. Homicides in the country are down 92 percent from 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported last July, and flows of Salvadoran migrants headed to the United States have dropped. Even Bukele’s political opponents admit they feel objectively far safer in the country.

But civil society organizations and democracy watchdogs warn this safety has come at a steep cost. To bring down El Salvador’s murder rate, Bukele’s government instituted a continually extended state of emergency that allowed it to arrest suspected gang members arbitrarily and without due process. More than 1 percent of the country’s population is incarcerated in a prison system Bukele boasts about on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Last year, Bukele opened a new mega facility he called the “Terrorism Confinement Center,” with capacity for 40,000 inmates. In a December 2023 report, Amnesty International warned of a “deepening punitive and repressive focus in the area of public security” and the “systematic use of torture and other abuse against prisoners in penal centers” in El Salvador.

Alarm bells from watchdogs have not dented Bukele’s popularity at all. As of May 2023, his approval rating stood at 91 percent. Politicians across Latin America are taking note, and some have vowed to emulate his policies—calling the Salvadoran president a “model” who “has accomplished a miracle.” Last October, Bukele suggested dealing with Hamas militants by adopting his zero-tolerance approach to MS-13.

Bukele has taken criticisms of his approach in stride, with mocking responses that include changing his bio on X to “world’s coolest dictator” for a period. The Salvadoran president’s internet presence may border on meme-like, but experts say it is a critical arm of his government’s media and public relations machine. X and TikTok don’t just help Bukele to whitewash contentious policies with sleek videos and provocative posts. The platforms also allow him to cultivate a distinctive persona where “light authoritarianism is built on a sense of coolness,” Broderick explained in 2021, likening Bukele’s X profile to that of Elon Musk.

Perhaps nothing encapsulates Bukele’s attempt at suave internet bro-ness more than his decision to institute bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador, an otherwise dollarized economy where most of the population does not have bank accounts and many lack internet access. The project was greeted with skepticism by the public and started failing within hours of its introduction, cryptocurrency expert David Gerard wrote in Foreign Policy in September 2021. The Bitcoin Law “frightened the bond markets,” Gerard added. “The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are already reluctant to supply further funding.”

Though Bukele won’t admit it, El Salvador needs that funding. With many creditors concerned about the bitcoin gamble, San Salvador has moved to play geopolitical games with its billions of dollars in sovereign debt. As journalist Danielle Mackey revealed in a November 2023 investigation for Foreign Policy, Bukele has instrumentalized the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI), which receives U.S. funding, to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to the Salvadoran government to buy back its own debt.

In another instance, Bukele used CABEI money earmarked for COVID-19 pandemic relief to purchase bitcoin, which Mackey called a “vanity project.” Bukele’s administration also has sought to sway U.S.-backed lenders by publicizing overtures to Chinese investors. Bukele said he anticipated El Salvador would sign a new deal with the IMF after this year’s elections.

Mackey’s reporting last year also showed how Bukele has eroded El Salvador’s democratic institutions. After his New Ideas party earned a supermajority in the country’s unicameral Legislative Assembly, Bukele was able to swiftly pass his agenda. He “deconstructed El Salvador’s justice system to make it friendly to him,” Mackey wrote, stacking its top body, the Constitutional Court, with loyalists and forcing scores of judges into retirement. All the while, a “growing cohort of Salvadoran jurists, journalists, and democracy and human rights activists have been forced into exile.”

The Bukele-friendly court is central to El Salvador’s Feb. 4 vote. Officially, the country’s constitution prohibits sitting presidents from running for reelection, but justices in 2021 issued a ruling allowing a second consecutive term. The Due Process of Law Foundation said the decision was part of El Salvador’s “rapid regression towards authoritarianism” and urged the Bukele administration to backtrack. But last October, Bukele and his Vice President Félix Ulloa registered their ticket to seek another five-year term.

On Nov. 30, 2023, Bukele formally stepped down from his post to hit the campaign trail. Though he is officially running for the presidency against a wide field of rival candidates, Bukele is all but guaranteed an absolute majority on Feb. 4, foregoing the need for a runoff. The Economist cited an August 2023 poll indicating that about 70 percent of Salvadorans intend to vote for Bukele. A November 2023 Gallup survey published in El Mundo was even more decisive: 93 percent of respondents said they would cast their ballots for Bukele, while his next-closest competitor—ARENA’s Joel Sánchez—followed at 3 percent. FMLN’s Manuel Flores registered just 2 percent.

All seats in the Legislative Assembly will also be up for grabs on Feb. 4, and most are likely to be won by New Ideas. A month later, on March 3, all of El Salvador’s municipalities will elect new mayors and councils. Throughout his term, Bukele has strengthened his control over both the legislature and municipalities, cutting the number of seats in the Legislative Assembly from 84 to 60 and reducing through mergers what was previously 262 municipalities—and mayors—to just 44.

At 42 years old, the self-proclaimed “CEO of El Salvador” already has a fraught legacy. In just one term, Bukele has amassed a genuine support base by measurably improving the lives of many Salvadorans. But to get there, his government has committed grave alleged human rights abuses and shown a disdain for democracy and the rule of law. He is on his way to at least five more years in power—and it doesn’t seem like anything can stop him.

Return to Full List

---

FEBRUARY 8

The Road to Power in Pakistan Runs Through the Military

Pakistan had been due to hold a vote last October but has now settled on Feb. 8 as a polling date.

The Pakistani Constitution stipulates that an election be held within 60 days of the parliament’s dissolution on a regular schedule and within 90 days if the body is suspended before its term is up. Then-Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif ended his term and stepped down on Aug. 9, 2023, handing control to a caretaker administration. But just before triggering the election countdown, Sharif’s government unveiled new census results; these are used to determine Pakistan’s voting constituencies. The country’s top electoral commission said it needed more time to redraw electoral maps based on the updated figures, and the contest was pushed to February.

“The opposition and its supporters believe the timing of the new census results was suspicious, and that it was used as a pretext to delay the elections to give the military more time to influence the electoral environment,” FP’s Michael Kugelman, the author of South Asia Brief, wrote in an email. The Pakistani military is known to be the country’s main power broker. As former Pakistani Ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani explained in Foreign Policy last August, “[t]he military says it is not involved in politics, but politicians are still pursuing the generals’ approval.”

In April 2022, the military fell afoul with then-Prime Minister Imran Khan. Khan, whose litany of legal woes rival those of former U.S. President Donald Trump in their complexity, has been in jail since August 2023 and is technically barred from politics for five years. But Khan and his backers call the many charges against him politically motivated. In late December 2023, Pakistan’s Supreme Court approved Khan’s bail in one case, and an Islamabad court stayed another trial until Jan. 11, yet the ex-leader remains locked up related to other charges. “Khan’s cult-like supporters regard him as a figure who can save Pakistan from corrupt, dynastic politics,” Haqqani wrote.

Now, a defiant Khan is still leading his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party’s list heading into next month’s vote. Authorities briefly sought to ban the PTI from printing its logo, a cricket bat, on ballots before a Peshawar court struck down the move. (Pakistan has high illiteracy rates, and logos help voters identify the correct candidate.) The state’s attempt to scrub the image may have been a response to the PTI’s popularity: In a Gallup Pakistan poll conducted over June and July 2023, Khan earned a 60 percent approval rating, and 42 percent of respondents expressed an intention to vote for the PTI, much higher shares than were garnered by any other politician or party. The center-right Pakistan Muslim League (PML) earned 20 percent, and the center-left Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) followed with 12 percent. The PML and PPP are traditionally rivals but formed a marriage of convenience to oust Khan in 2022.

The brief tenure of the PML-PPP unity government was less chaotic than the three-and-a-half years that Pakistan experienced under Khan, but the country still faced its fair share of challenges. In addition to wrestling continued agitations from Khan and his supporters, Pakistan experienced “biblical” flooding in August 2022 and found itself in economic trouble. (Islamabad under its current caretaker government finally approved a bailout deal with the International Monetary Fund in November, a prospect Khan had spurned.) There’s also been an uptick in xenophobia against Afghan migrants. Last fall, the caretaker government—likely at the behest of the military—oversaw the expulsion of 1.7 million Afghans from Pakistan.

Shehbaz Sharif is not running as the PML’s top candidate in this election, however. That distinction goes to his brother, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who recently returned to Pakistan after spending four years in exile in the United Kingdom. Khan and Nawaz Sharif may be bitter foes, but they have one thing in common: Nawaz Sharif is also banned from politics thanks to a 14-year corruption sentence. But Pakistani authorities said Nawaz Sharif could not be arrested until he appears in court, and the PML successfully appealed his conviction and sentences, making him eligible for next month’s elections.

Even though Nawaz Sharif was once ousted in a military-backed coup, observers agree that the Pakistan Armed Forces appear to be once again backing the PML. That’s bad news both for Khan and PPP head Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who most recently served as Shahbaz Sharif’s foreign minister. Kugelman said “the electoral playing field won’t be level,” with the PML enjoying a “big advantage.” Pakistan’s electoral commission has already been accused of redrawing electoral maps with the new census data to favor the PML.

Even so, public opinion seems to be tilting in the PML’s direction: In the Gallup poll, a plurality of voters said they would cast ballots for the PML, rather than the PPP, if Khan’s PTI did not participate in the next elections.

The weeks ahead are likely to feature a great deal of political and legal machinations from all of Pakistan’s major parties. In mid-December 2023, Pakistan’s Supreme Court announced that it would form a committee to adjudicate political bans—a move that Kugelman wrote “seems to pave the way for Nawaz Sharif … to run for office.” Lo and behold, the PML announced just weeks later that Nawaz Sharif would be its top candidate in the Feb. 8 vote.

If elections go ahead, Pakistanis will vote for all 342 seats in the National Assembly, the lower House of parliament, most of which are in single-member constituencies. The remaining seats are awarded through a proportional, party-based allocation system. That is, if the military approves.

Return to Full List

---

February 14

A New Dynasty Rises in Jokowi’s Indonesia

Indonesia is the world’s fourth-most-populous country, after the United States. But more voters will head to the polls on election day in Indonesia than in the United States, making the country’s Valentine’s Day vote the world’s largest single-day contest of 2024. More than 200 million people are eligible to cast ballots in Indonesia, in contrast to the under 170 million registered voters in the United States. Turnout is generally much higher in the Southeast Asian archipelago nation, too. In Indonesia’s last presidential election in 2019, 80 percent of eligible voters participated; the 2020 U.S. election saw a record-high turnout of just 66 percent.

Democracy is a young and treasured—but imperfect—institution in Indonesia. The country was governed by a U.S.-backed military dictatorship from 1966 to 1998, mostly under the notorious Gen. Suharto. Suharto’s ouster has been referred to as an “inside job” that created rules that guaranteed entrenched elites retained power. Among those rules is a requirement that a prospective presidential candidate’s party hold at least 20 percent of seats in parliament for the candidate to run—the highest such threshold in the world.

One of the large parties that has managed to thrive under these circumstances is the centrist Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP), led by Megawati Sukarnoputri, who served as the country’s first—and thus far only—female president from 2001 to 2004 and still leads the party today. The PDIP is also the party that facilitated the rise of incumbent President Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi.

Megawati took a chance on Jokowi in his 2014 presidential bid. Jokowi himself did not have an elite background—he grew up in a slum—but had a solid track record as the governor of the capital, Jakarta. In the intervening years, however, the two have grown apart, as Jokowi broke with party norms and began building up his own support base.

Today, Jokowi is one of the most well-liked leaders in the world, with approval ratings around 80 percent. A personality cult has built up around him, thanks in part to his political camp’s social media savvy. (Indonesia has the world’s second-largest TikTok audience.)

Under Jokowi’s leadership, Indonesia’s GDP has risen by 43 percent, and the country’s economy is among the fastest-growing globally. He has pushed for mass improvements in infrastructure—even announcing the construction of a new capital city to replace Jakarta, a project that is contentious—and has hosted summits of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations as Indonesia seeks to carve out a space as a key nonaligned middle power amid intensifying competition between the United States and China. (Aside from Indonesia’s key geographic location on the Strait of Malacca, Beijing is also interested in its critical mineral reserves.)

Jokowi has also been an important figure for climate issues: In 2022, Indonesia inked a deal with Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to protect the world’s rainforests—which mostly fall in those three countries. Altogether, Indonesia is one of six “swing states” that “will decide the future of geopolitics,” the Eurasia Group’s Cliff Kupchan wrote in Foreign Policy in June 2023.

But Jokowi’s tenure hasn’t come without controversy. Human Rights Watch’s Brad Adams reported in 2020 that, under the incumbent president, “the human rights situation took a turn for the worse,” with freedoms of speech and assembly—as well as protections for minorities, such as the LGBTQ+ community—under attack. Jokowi has also weakened Indonesia’s democratic institutions. “Under his tenure, free elections have been threatened, civil liberties have declined, corruption fighters and legislative checks weakened, and the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs has grown,” Saiful Mujani and R. William Liddle wrote in the Journal of Democracy in October 2021.

Jokowi has served two terms and is constitutionally barred from seeking reelection. But that hasn’t stopped him from building up what journalist Joseph Rachman called a “dynasty” in Foreign Policy in November 2023. Indonesia’s top court annulled a 40-year age minimum to allow one of Jokowi’s sons, Gibran Rakabuming Raka—aged 36—to run as a vice presidential candidate alongside Jokowi’s defense minister, Prabowo Subianto. Prabowo, who previously lost the presidency to Jokowi, belongs to the right-wing Gerindra Party and was a military officer under Suharto.

Prabowo will face two other contenders for Indonesia’s presidency: Ganjar Pranowo, the PDIP’s pick, and independent Anies Baswedan. The three candidates’ platforms are relatively similar, with all vowing to continue Jokowi’s economic legacy and attempting to outdo one another with support for Palestine amid Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas. (Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country.)

Ganjar in particular is known for his campaign to exclude Israel from participating in the 2023 Under-20 FIFA World Cup. The tournament was meant to be hosted in Indonesia, but organizers moved it to Argentina amid their row with Ganjar, who until recently served as the governor of the state of Central Java. Indonesian soccer fans turned on Ganjar, but he earned support from hard-line Islamists and backers of the Palestinian cause. Anies, a former governor of Jakarta, has built his campaign on opposition to Jokowi’s new capital project.

It is Prabowo, with Gibran at his side, who has what is perhaps the best claim to what has been dubbed “Jokowinomics.” A Dec. 9, 2023, opinion poll by Indikator Politik Indonesia and cited by Reuters showed that Prabowo’s ticket is leading the field with 45.8 percent to Ganjar’s 25.6 percent. (Anies is trailing the field with lower numbers that were not reported.) If neither candidate wins a majority on Feb. 14—a likely prospect—they will head to a runoff in June.

Voters will also elect 575 new members of Indonesia’s House of Representatives via an open-list proportional system. Provinces and smaller local jurisdictions will hold contests, too. In total, Indonesians will choose almost 20,000 legislators on Feb. 14. It will be the first time a national Indonesian election is held during the rainy season, which could impact turnout and overall electoral expediency.

Jokowi has not endorsed any candidate but is assumed to be privately backing his son’s ticket. As Rachman put it: The incumbent, once an antidote to Indonesia’s entrenched elites, “is now resorting to the usual methods of the country’s oligarchy as he looks to remain a power player once he leaves office.”

Return to Full List

---

February 25

Senegal Tries to Beat the Odds in Africa’s Coup Belt

Several countries in the African continent’s Sahel region—sometimes called the “coup belt”—are slated to hold elections next year. The only one of them where the vote has a chance of being even remotely fair is Senegal, which has long been an outlier to the region’s anti-democratic trends.

That doesn’t mean that Senegal’s democracy is healthy, however. Since the country gained independence from France in 1960, it has been governed by only four presidents. And just two have taken office in peaceful transfers of power—the first of which occurred in 2000. After some speculation about whether incumbent President Macky Sall would attempt to skirt Senegal’s two-term limit to run again this year, he announced in July 2023 that he would not stand in the Feb. 25 elections and planned to step down. Sall had previously amended the constitution to reduce a term’s length from seven to five years and argued that this change had reset his term limits, though most Senegalese legal experts disagreed.

His decision was “both a relief and a source of pride for a country often seen as a barometer of democracy in Africa,” French newspaper Le Monde wrote in an editorial. It will be the first time that a Senegalese incumbent president organizes an election that they are not themselves running in.

That Sall would abide by the constitution was not a given. During his 12 years at Senegal’s helm, he has eroded the country’s young democratic bona fides. The Economist Intelligence Unit downgraded the government in Dakar from a “flawed democracy” to a “hybrid regime” in 2020, and its Freedom House score fell several times over the course of Sall’s terms, too. Journalists now report self-censoring in an increasingly restrictive media environment.

Sall has made a pattern of jailing his political opponents under spurious charges, bending Senegal’s justice system to his will. The latest victim is opposition leader Ousmane Sonko, who heads the Liberate the People opposition coalition and placed third in the last presidential elections in 2019.

In 2021, Sonko faced rape allegations that he claimed were concocted to stall his career. On his way to court, Sonko’s supporters took to the streets, and he was arrested on charges of disturbing public order. The ordeal unleashed weeks of nationwide protests that saw 14 people killed—12 of them by security forces, according to Amnesty International. Sall’s authorities shut down the internet and businesses were subject to widespread looting.

Demonstrations have continued on and off since then—with many more casualties and abuses by security forces reported—as Sonko has faced a never-ending series of legal battles. Though Sonko was acquitted of the rape charges, he was convicted in June 2023 on charges of “corrupting youth,” another sexual offense. A month later, Sonko was saddled with further charges of plotting an insurrection, and his participation in February’s election is in question. Last December, a Senegalese court ordered Sonko’s candidacy to be restored, but he remains in jail, and the government reportedly intends to appeal the verdict.

Sonko “is especially popular among the youth, who are drawn to his populist platform of radical opposition and greater economic independence,” FP’s Christina Lu reported in March 2021. Senegal is facing many challenges, including widespread youth unemployment and rising insecurity. Sall is also under scrutiny for various corruption scandals. Many Senegalese see former colonizer France behind their country’s woes, and protests have taken on a distinctly anti-French bent.

Sonko promises to be an antidote to all of the above. Last year, he filed a criminal complaint in a French court accusing Sall of “crimes against humanity.” Sall’s supporters, for their part, say he and his United in Hope (BBY) coalition have bolstered Senegal’s infrastructure and increased public sector wages.

Senegal’s Constitutional Council is expected to announce an official slate of candidates later this month, but—in addition to Sonko—an array of politicians has already entered the fray. Sall announced in September that Prime Minister Amadou Ba would be the BBY’s continuity candidate. Idrissa Seck, the runner-up in 2019’s presidential election, is also in the running. So is former Prime Minister Aminata Touré, among a wide field of other expected candidates.

With no reliable polling available yet, the big question that remains is whether Sonko will be able to run or not.  The BBY came out on top in 2022 legislative elections—but the leading candidates of the Liberate the People coalition had been disqualified. If no candidate achieves a majority in the first-round vote, a runoff will be held at a later date. Amnesty International has warned of heightened repression ahead of the February contest.

Sonko’s participation is already a heated issue on the campaign trail: Seck has come out in favor of Sonko and a free vote. “We can disagree openly in Senegal, but we should never force our brothers and sisters into silence through persecution,” Seck is quoted by Al Jazeera as saying. Even though Sall himself is not running in the election, he is proving that he can still exercise much sway over the contest’s outcome.

Return to Full List

---

March 1

Iran’s Crushed Protests Leave Public Skeptical on Elections

In recent years, Iran has been swept by protests and waning government legitimacy. In September 2022, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini died in the custody of Iran’s morality police, who had arrested her for allegedly violating the country’s mandatory hijab policy. The events provoked months of Gen Z-led civic outrage that briefly challenged—but ultimately emboldened—Tehran’s clerical regime under the leadership of President Ebrahim Raisi and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The ultraconservative Raisi was elected in 2021 in a process that FP’s Ravi Agrawal called “unfree, unfair, and preordained.” Iran’s Guardian Council, a religious constitutional body that approves all candidates for office, had eliminated any viable challenges to Raisi—who was favored by Khamenei to succeed more moderate then-President Hassan Rouhani. In an interview with Agrawal, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Karim Sadjadpour referred to Raisi as an “obsequious protege” of and a “heat seeking-missile for Khamenei’s ass.”

Raisi’s presidency has been tumultuous. In addition to the Mahsa Amini protests, Iranians are upset about the state of the country’s economy. As of 2022, 30 percent of Iranian households were living below the poverty line amid rampant inflation and heavy U.S. sanctions. Though Raisi mended ties with longtime foe Saudi Arabia, tensions with adversaries Israel and the United States have soared—particularly amid the latter’s ongoing war with Hamas, a militant group that receives funding from Tehran.

This year, Khamenei is seeking to solidify his control over Iran’s institutions in legislative elections that will see Iranians elect all 290 seats in the Majlis, the country’s representative parliament, and all 88 members of the Assembly of Experts, which appoints the supreme leader.

Most observers agree that the Majlis has little policymaking authority and serves instead to rubber-stamp decisions made by Raisi and Khamenei. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy cited a July 2023 poll by state media that 68 percent of Iranians are dissatisfied with the parliament. Majlis members serve four-year terms; voter turnout during the last Majlis election in 2020—held mostly before the onset of the pandemic—was a little more than 42 percent. The Majlis is dominated by two conservative factions: Raisi’s hard-line ideological Steadfastness Front and a more mainstream, pragmatic group led by Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf.

The Assembly of Experts, which meets just twice per calendar year, could have more sway over the future of Iranian politics. That’s because Khamenei is 84 years old. If he were to die over the next eight years—the length of a term in the assembly—it would be charged with choosing his successor. Khamenei seems to be angling for his son Mojtaba Khamenei to take over, but Rouhani is also considered to be a potential contender. Rouhani appears to be reading a candidacy for the assembly, which he was a member of before becoming president in 2013.

During the last assembly election in 2016, the Guardian Council disqualified 80 percent of candidates to the Assembly of Experts. All of the council’s current members are men, and almost all are over the age of 50. Only one is not a cleric.

The rejection rate for Majlis contenders is lower: During a one-week preregistration period in August 2023, Iranian authorities reported receiving a record 49,000 candidate applications. By Nov. 18, 2023, regular-phase registrations numbered almost 25,000, according to Voice of America, with a rejection rate of about 28 percent.

Regardless of how many candidates make the ballot for both the Majlis and Assembly of Experts, the more consequential question is whether Iran’s reformists will boycott the vote. For Raisi and Khamenei, low turnout could be a double-edged sword. A reformist boycott would almost guarantee their hard-line camp a victory. But by laying bare their government’s waning public legitimacy, it would also make them look weaker than ever.

Return to Full List

---

March 15-17

Putin’s Russia Is Barely Pretending Its Elections Are Real

Always a thorn in the side of Washington and Brussels, U.S. and European relations with Moscow worsened precipitously following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

With no end to the war in sight, U.S. intelligence estimates that 315,000 Russian troops have so far been killed or injured in fighting, as of Dec. 12, 2023. The Ukrainian government does not release casualty tolls, but Washington reported in August 2023 that the number of Ukrainian combatant deaths likely stands around 70,000. The U.N. approximates that more than 10,000 Ukrainian civilians have died.

Nearly two years into the conflict, the Russian economy has weathered punitive Western sanctions surprisingly well. That’s in part because many countries of the global south have been reluctant to join what they see as a Cold War redux between the United States and Russia—and are upset about hypocrisy in Washington’s selective condemnation of Russia’s alleged wartime abuses versus, say, Israel’s.

President Vladimir Putin’s approval rating is at a sky-high 85 percent as of November 2023, according to the Levada Center, a reliable independent Russian pollster. The center cites public opinion surrounding Putin’s so-called “special military operation” and the “conflict” in Ukraine—the Kremlin has warned it will block websites that use the term “war” or “invasion.”

Putin, a staple of Russian politics for the past quarter century, likely needs no introduction in the pages of Foreign Policy. Yet it bears repeating that domestic office and global notoriety are nothing new to Putin. Now an indicted criminal by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in Ukraine, Putin began his career as an intelligence operative for the Soviet-era KGB before taking office as president in 2000. He has been in power nearly continuously since then, with a brief four-year stint as prime minister from 2008 to 2012 due to term limits. (Loyal apparatchik Dmitry Medvedev served as president during that time.)

Putin’s tenure at Russia’s helm—whether as head of state or head of government—has been marked by a descent into authoritarianism, rampant corruption, and systemic human rights abuses. Independent media has been all but shut down; political opponents are intimidated at best and allegedly poisoned at worst. Putin has battled Chechen separatists domestically and ensnared himself in numerous military campaigns beyond Russia’s borders. Even before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia had annexed the Crimean Peninsula and supported Syria’s Bashar al-Assad with a brutal bombing campaign in Syria. The Kremlin also fought wars in the former Soviet republic of Georgia and counts proxies the world over.

In a sign of how much Russian democracy has regressed under Putin, the president has decided that term limits do not matter in 2024 like they did in 2008. Until recently, Russia’s constitution forbade more than two consecutive six-year presidential terms. (Putin extended a term’s length from four to six years in 2008, effective 2012.) But in 2020, when a member of Putin’s coalition conveniently proposed that the charter be amended to drop this rule, the president was on board. Though it was never in doubt, Putin made his candidacy for a fifth term official in December 2023.

The Russian presidential election will be a three-day affair from March 15 to 17. It is not expected to be free or fair and will almost certainly cement Putin’s stranglehold on the country’s political system. After the last presidential vote in 2018, monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said candidates competed on an “uneven playing field” and that, in Russia, “elections almost lose their purpose.” That year, in a flex of territorial muscle, Russia held votes for the first time on the annexed Crimean Peninsula. This year, Putin intends to extend the presidential contest to the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine.

Technically, Putin has competition. But in practice, no other presidential candidate stands a chance. His main rival, opposition leader Alexei Navalny, is behind bars and banned from running. Another potential contender, ultranationalist Igor Girkin—who has decried Putin’s posture in Ukraine as tepid and called the president “cowardly”—is also in prison. The long list of other politicians who have expressed interest in a run will likely register in the single percentage points.

Despite the bleak circumstances, voter turnout in Russia rivals that of U.S. presidential elections. In the 2018 presidential election, more than 67 percent of eligible Russian voters went to the polls.

The biggest challenge to Putin’s rule is likely already behind him—and it didn’t come at the ballot box. In June 2023, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the paramilitary Wagner Group—a private contractor that had, until then, been seen as doing the Kremlin’s dirty work in military entanglements from Syria to Mali—rebelled against Putin in an armed revolt.

In Foreign Policy, Yale University professor Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon M. Huntsman Jr., and author William F. Browder called the mutiny the “biggest existential threat Putin has faced in his more than 20-year rule.”

Putin quickly quashed the revolt, and Prigozhin has since died in a plane crash, widely believed to have been caused by the Russian government. Former NPR Moscow Bureau Chief Lucian Kim wrote that, in the short-lived Wagner uprising, “the full madness of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship was on display.” It will be that, too, when Putin extends his presidential mandate even further in March.

Return to Full List

---

Between April and May, Date to Be Confirmed

Under Modi, India’s Democracy Is on Its Last Legs

Many countries have been reluctant to distance themselves from Russia amid its war in Ukraine. One of them is India. India is proudly nonaligned and counts itself both as a member of the BRICS grouping with Brazil, Russia, China, and South Africa as well as of the U.S.-led “Quad,” which also includes Japan and Australia.

New Delhi is keen to level its malleable geopolitical position to grow India’s global profile—and no leader has devoted more to that effort than Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In September 2022, while on a visit to Washington, Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar quipped that “our [India’s] opinions count, our views matter and have actually today the ability to shape the big issues of our time” thanks to Modi.

Modi, who has been in power since 2014, presides over the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has effectively dislodged the progressive secular Indian National Congress (INC) as the country’s traditional power broker. The INC spearheaded the Indian independence movement and ruled India for most of its history. It has also “effectively functioned as a hereditary dictatorship led by the Gandhi family for more than five decades,” author Kapil Komireddi wrote in Foreign Policy in October 2022.

To his critics, Modi is a walking controversy and wannabe despot; to his admirers—who are, in India, a much larger group—he is a compassionate leader unwavering in his commitment to governance. According to Morning Consult, Modi has the highest approval rating of any democratically elected leader in the world, at 78 percent, as of late November 2023.

While many leaders can claim to be figureheads of political personality cults, Modi’s is perhaps the biggest—and most detrimental to global democracy. The historian Ramachandra Guha argued as much in a landmark November 2022 essay in Foreign Policy entitled “The Cult of Modi.” Modi is popular, Guha contended, for six reasons: because he is genuinely “self-made” and hardworking, is a skilled orator, has weak political rivals, has effectively capitalized on Hindu nationalist sentiment, leads a shrewd propaganda and social media campaign, and is emotionally intelligent.

More practically, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has identified Modi’s brand as one of “competitive welfarism”: In addition to identity politics, the prime minister has been able to court favor by upping public spending and cash transfers to Indians.

In turn, Guha wrote, Modi has managed to weaken five of India’s key democratic institutions: political parties, the cabinet, the press, bureaucracy, and the judiciary. Agricultural reforms that set off nationwide farmers protests starting in late 2020 were unpopular in part because Modi rushed them through parliament—just one of many “bold decisions with little care for democratic decision-making” by the prime minister, FP’s Ravi Agrawal wrote at the time.

Modi has also gone after political opponents: Former INC head Rahul Gandhi was convicted last year on charges of defamation and sentenced to two years in prison after insulting Modi at a rally. In late December 2023, the prime minister suspended 141 opposition members of Parliament who were protesting a recent security breach.

Independent journalism has taken a beating, too. Reporters Without Borders has warned that “violence against journalists, the politically partisan media and the concentration of media ownership all demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis” in India. The country’s press freedom ranking fell 21 spots from 2014 to 2023, thanks in part to the BJP’s efforts to muzzle journalism and big tech, FP’s Rishi Iyengar reported last year. Rules enacted in 2021 allow the government to demand media companies remove content that violates an impossibly broad set of standards. Experts say they “have given Modi carte blanche to go after critics and opponents, shrinking the space for free speech—online and otherwise,” Iyengar wrote.

The most notorious case of these rules’ application so far was Modi’s banning of a documentary produced by the BBC in January 2023—and subsequent raids of BBC offices in Mumbai and New Delhi. The film examined Modi’s role in deadly anti-Muslim riots in the state of Gujarat during his time as chief minister there.

Analyzing the debacle in Foreign Policy, writer Salil Tripathi pointed out that, for Modi, “the documentary brings back ghosts of the past.” That’s because Modi has inflamed religious tensions in India like no other leader to date. Now the world’s most populous country—with over 1.4 billion people—India is majority Hindu but still home to many religious minorities, including the world’s third-largest Muslim population and a sizable Sikh community.

Modi, keen to rekindle what he sees as a glorious pre-colonial Hindu legacy, has weaponized anti-Muslim sentiment among Hindu nationalists to produce big victories at the polls. He has also enacted policies that advocates say are motivated by Islamophobia. As just one example, in 2019, the BJP passed a law that limits Muslim immigrants’ access to Indian citizenship. In pre-pandemic March 2020, as demonstrations against the measure were ongoing, FP’s Anchal Vohra reported from Meerut, India, that police appeared to be “setting Muslims and Hindus against each other” and then “stood by during violence—or actively sided with Hindus.”

Guha’s assessment of the situation is grim. “​[I]f it lasts much longer, the Modi regime may come to be remembered as much for its evisceration of Indian pluralism as for its dismantling of Indian democracy,” he wrote in his essay.

Modi’s Hindu nationalism, known as Hindutva, has also extended to his foreign policy. In 2019, Modi amended the Indian Constitution to revoke Muslim-majority Kashmir’s semiautonomous status, cutting off communications and deploying troops to the region. He’s also boosted ties with Israel, seeing in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government a similar animosity toward Islam.

The United States and other Western powers have sought to court India as a partner against China while mostly ignoring Modi’s democratic regression and marginalization of minority populations. When Modi visited the United States in June 2023, U.S. President Joe Biden greeted him with a state dinner, and just a few progressive lawmakers boycotted Modi’s address to Congress. But last fall, revelations about the Indian government’s alleged involvement in the assassination of a Sikh leader in Canada—and the attempted assassination of a Sikh leader in the United States—rattled this delicate tight rope.

So far, “Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has paid little price for many of its actions” on the world stage, Yale lecturer Sushant Singh wrote in Foreign Policy in December 2023. Domestically, going after Sikh separatists could even be a boon for Modi because it might “help bolster the prime minister’s strongman image ahead of next year’s national election,” Singh added.

That’s a vote that Modi and the BJP look like they will win handily. India’s Financial Express predicts a “hat-trick” for the prime minister, who easily earned majorities in 2014 and 2019. The BJP is leading a coalition called the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) to rival an INC-led group of 28 parties known as the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), led by Mallikarjun Kharge (whom Komireddi called a Gandhi “surrogate”). Some smaller parties are running on their own, too.

To obtain a majority in India’s 543-member Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, parties need at least 272 seats. A December 2023 Times Now-ETG survey predicted that the NDA would win 323 seats to INDIA’s 163. Candidates are elected in single-member constituencies in a first-past-the-post system to serve five-year terms.

Indian authorities have not yet announced when elections will occur, but it’s certain they will be a multiweek affair. India’s last national election, in 2019, was held over the course of more than one month to accommodate all voters. Because the Lok Sabha’s term ends in June, most observers expect that India’s “election month” this year could range from April to May.

In December 2023, the BJP won big in three state elections, setting the party up well for the national contest this spring. Observers like Komireddi are likely concerned. This year’s vote, he wrote, is “the final chance to stop Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s conversion of the world’s largest democracy into an illiberal Hindu-supremacist state.”

Return to Full List

---

Between May and August, Date to Be Confirmed

Frustrated South Africa Wonders if ANC Is Still Worth It

South Africa’s relationship with the United States has always been complicated. The country is nonaligned and is a member of the BRICS grouping with Brazil, Russia, India, and China. And in early 2023, the South African military conducted joint training exercises with China and Russia, setting off alarm bells in Washington.

Pretoria values its ties with Moscow in part because the Soviet Union backed the struggle against the white supremacist apartheid regime, which the United States often supported until the mid-1980s. Now, U.S. officials are engaged in hectic backchannel diplomacy to mend relations with South Africa and make the case for supporting Kyiv, FP’s Robbie Gramer revealed in an exclusive report last July.

But war in Ukraine feels far off for many in South Africa—and not just because of geography or historical affinities. South Africans have more than enough domestic concerns of their own.

Three decades after the end of apartheid, the country remains deeply divided along racial and economic lines. As of 2022, South Africa was the most unequal society in the world. In an April 2023 episode of Ones and Tooze, FP’s Adam Tooze described seeing, during his travels to South Africa, “a situation so incongruous that it creates a sort of slightly surreal impression.” Overall unemployment in the country currently stands at 33 percent—and 61 percent for those aged 15 to 24. But as Tooze noted, “[i]t’s the Black population that suffers the crushing levels of unemployment.” Crime is also mounting, according to authorities.

Some South Africans have turned to blaming foreigners from elsewhere in Africa for their malaise—fueling growing xenophobia in what was once affectionately known as the “Rainbow Nation.” That’s having an impact on politics: “[L]oath to alienate a large part of the electorate, the government has been slow to condemn xenophobia, with some ministers openly espousing it themselves,” journalist Kate Bartlett wrote in Foreign Policy in July 2022, profiling a provocateur she called “South Africa’s Donald Trump.”

South Africans also feel left in the dark by their government—literally. Rolling blackouts are now a routine feature of daily life amid an energy shortage and dysfunction at national utility company Eskom, FP’s Anusha Rathi explained in July 2022. The crisis is “part of a growing list of promises that the African National Congress [ANC] party has failed to deliver on,” she wrote.

This year, the ANC will face its biggest test yet in national legislative elections, which are expected to be held between May and August, according to authorities. As South Africa’s party of liberation, the social democratic ANC has held power uninterrupted since the country’s 1994 transition to democracy, always winning a majority of seats in the National Assembly—the country’s lower house of parliament—to avoid a coalition government. But its grip is waning. An October 2023 poll by the Social Research Foundation saw the ANC’s support dip to 45 percent. The party is currently led by President Cyril Ramaphosa. (Unlike most other parliamentary systems, which appoint a prime minister, South Africa’s victorious party selects a president—who is both head of state and head of government.)

Many voters increasingly associate the ANC with corruption. No ANC leader helped fuel this trend more than former President Jacob Zuma, who served from 2009 to 2018 and whose “grand theft of public resources was labeled ‘state capture,’” the late analyst Eusebius McKaiser wrote in Foreign Policy in July 2021, after Zuma’s arrest. But Ramaphosa later pardoned Zuma—and then became ensnared in a graft scandal of his own, known as “Farmgate.”

Despite the ANC’s waning support, it’s hard to imagine another party running things in Pretoria. The ANC’s chief rival is the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), a big-tent centrist party led by legislator John Steenhuisen. Steenhuisen has formed what he calls a “Moonshot Pact” with six smaller parties in an attempt to oust the ANC. “Just as with the original Moonshot … there were a lot of naysayers,” Steenhuisen said when announcing his new group in August 2023.

Analysts who spoke with Al Jazeera are among them: While the DA is certainly more prominent than ever before, it still registers far lower than the ANC in polling and has a smaller grassroots base. A coalition as varied as Moonshot also risks splintering. And there is the fact that Steenhuisen, while heading a multiracial party, is himself white. Many Black politicians have left the DA in recent years for a variety of reasons, which has not helped bolster its image as an inclusive institution.

With poll numbers below 50 percent, the ANC could try to form a coalition with the left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)—the third-largest party in Parliament behind the ANC and DA—though the idea is contentious. The Marxist-Leninist EFF has long been controversial, particularly in its advocacy of land expropriation. Last summer, the party also became the subject of a global smear campaign after Elon Musk tweeted a video of the EFF’s leader chanting “kill the Boer,” an anti-apartheid slogan that Musk—who is South African—claimed was a call for the “genocide of white people in South Africa.”

When elections are held, South Africans will elect 400 members to the country’s National Assembly for five-year terms via party-list proportional representation. Last year, Ramaphosa also signed into law a bill that allows independent candidates—and not just those who belong to political parties—to stand in elections. Voters will also select members of their provincial parliaments.

Analysts expect turnout to be low, especially among younger voters, given widespread political apathy. Turnout during the last national elections in 2019 was around 66 percent. Only 17 percent of registered voters are under 30, according to authorities, despite the country’s median age of 27.6.

John McDermott, the Economist’s Cape Town correspondent, expects the ANC will be able to eke out another victory—if only due to the lack of good alternatives. But, McDermott warned, this could be the party’s “last triumph.” Born out of a 20th-century struggle, the ANC will need to adjust to 21st-century realities if it is to continue earning voters’ trust.

Return to Full List

---

June 2

AMLO’s Legacy Is on the Ballot in Mexico

In North America, much of the world will be fixated on the United States’ presidential election this November. But that contest is expected to be fought between two geriatric white men who have both held the presidency before. In terms of representation and generational political change, neighboring Mexico’s June 2 general election promises to be much more groundbreaking. That’s because the victor will almost certainly be a woman, for the first time in Mexican—or, for that matter, U.S.—history.

Incumbent President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, is facing a one-term limit after six years in office. But he’s played a central role in his own succession race, securing the nomination of his protégée, Claudia Sheinbaum, as his Morena party’s presidential candidate. Sheinbaum was until recently the mayor of Mexico City but stepped down from her post last summer to hit the campaign trail. She will face Xóchitl Gálvez, a former senator who is heading a coalition of opposition parties.

López Obrador founded the leftist-populist Morena party in 2011 with the express purpose of running for president and maintains great sway over the organization. His 2018 election shook up Mexican politics, which have traditionally been dominated by the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). From 1929 to 2000, all of Mexico’s presidents hailed from the PRI; López Obrador’s immediate predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto, was also a member of the party. Last June, Morena seemed to breach the PRI’s last defenses—ousting the party in elections in the State of Mexico, the province surrounding Mexico City, where the PRI had been in power without interruption for almost 100 years.

For the time being, many observers in Mexico consider Morena—and its popular president—to be a seemingly unstoppable political force. As of November 2023, López Obrador’s approval rating stood at 66 percent—far higher than the paltry 23 percent enjoyed by his PRI predecessor at this point in their respective presidencies, according to polls cited by the Americas Society/Council of the Americas. Morning Consult pegs López Obrador as the second-most popular democratically elected leader in the world after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

López Obrador’s presidency has hardly been smooth sailing; his response to the COVID-19 pandemic, for one, was an undisputed catastrophe. While investing heavily in public works to ensure support from his electorate, which includes Mexico’s poor, López Obrador has spurned the private sector and consolidated power over many of his country’s institutions. (The president is set to up spending on social programs by 25 percent ahead of June’s election.) The Mexican economy has grown sluggishly during his time in office. And perhaps more irreversibly, Mexico’s democracy has declined, too.

Throughout López Obrador’s tenure, the Economist Intelligence Unit has downgraded Mexico from a “flawed democracy” to a “hybrid regime.” The president’s most recent anti-democratic moves include an attempt to gut funding for Mexico’s respected election watchdog, the National Electoral Institute, in a reform that would “strip the agency’s independence,” Rocío Fabbro reported in Foreign Policy in March 2023. The proposed changes prompted mass protests across the country but did not dent López Obrador’s popularity. Mexico’s Supreme Court ultimately struck down part of law, calming some fears that it could have impacted this year’s vote.

The president has also tried his hand at rewriting the rules of Mexico’s security policy. Violence remains one of the country’s most persistent problems. “It is estimated that cartels control nearly half of Mexico’s territory—a figure that could be an undercount,” the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Ryan C. Berg wrote in Foreign Policy in September 2023. “Seven of the 10 most homicidal cities globally on a per capita basis are now in Mexico.”

Much of this insecurity has U.S. roots: As journalist Chantal Flores reported in Foreign Policy in October 2023, “[a]t least 70 percent of guns recovered at crime scenes in Mexico between 2014 and 2018 were trafficked into the country from the United States.” Mexico itself is home to only one authorized gun store.

When López Obrador came to office, he vowed to take the Mexican military off the streets in a policy he called “hugs, not bullets.” But he soon reversed course, merging multiple national police forces into a civilian-led gendarmerie known as the National Guard with the justification that existing police units had been corrupt. Later into his term, López Obrador attempted to transfer the National Guard to military control, raising alarm bells for advocates concerned about the militarization of public safety. Once again, Mexico’s Supreme Court put a stop to López Obrador’s machinations.

The irony is that the United States is keen to work with López Obrador on security cooperation, as well as on key issues like immigration and drug trafficking. But the Mexican president has made the defense of national sovereignty—and resentment for his country’s domineering northern neighbor—one of the pillars of his political brand. As just one example, López Obrador could be the spoiler to a new U.S.-China plan to curb the illegal trade of fentanyl—a rare area where the two superpowers now appear to see eye to eye, FP’s Catherine Osborn, the author of Latin America Brief, reported in November 2023.

As contenders for the Republican presidential nomination seriously suggest the United States invade Mexico in a 21st-century resurrection of the disgraced Monroe Doctrine, bilateral relations between the two countries hang in the balance. It’s rare that Mexico and the United States hold concurrent presidential elections; depending on who is elected north and south of the Rio Grande, neighbor diplomacy in the coming years could look very different. Last year, Mexico became the United States’ top trading partner amid U.S. attempts to boost “nearshoring.” That trend could continue—or rupture—under new leadership.

Sheinbaum and Morena are the clear front-runners in Mexico’s race. In addition to picking the country’s next president, the general election will also see voters select all 628 seats of Mexico’s bicameral legislature; the 500 members of the lower house, or the Chamber of Deputies, serve three-year terms, while the 128 members of the upper house, or Senate, are in office for six years. Both chambers are elected through a mix of majoritarian and proportional representation. Some states and localities are holding contests, too.

Ahead of the vote, Morena formed a left-leaning coalition with smaller parties named Let’s Keep Making History. That group leads polls with 60 percent as of December 2023, according to an aggregate of surveys compiled by the Americas Society/Council of the Americas. The opposition coalition led by Gálvez—the Broad Front for Mexico—followed at 33 percent. And a third camp, the center-left Citizens’ Movement, earned 7 percent. The results were slightly narrower when voters were asked about their intended choice for president in November 2023: Forty-eight percent indicated Sheinbaum, followed by Gálvez’s 24 percent and the Citizens’ Movement’s Samuel García’s 8 percent. Candidates need just a plurality of votes—rather than a majority—to win.

Gálvez’s Broad Front, which includes the PRI, is a big-tent movement united by little other than distaste with López Obrador. Gálvez was until recently a member of the conservative National Action Party, which traditionally rivals the PRI but has chosen to work together to try to dislodge Morena from power. She now considers herself to be on the center-left and boasts a rags-to-riches story that she hopes will inspire popular support.

For now, the race is Sheinbaum’s to lose. The extent to which she would follow in López Obrador’s footsteps is unclear. Osborn has called Sheinbaum more of a pragmatist; the erstwhile mayor of North America’s largest city is an environmental scientist by training and is known for her progressive, green credentials. She made Mexico City’s school uniforms gender neutral and became the first mayor to attend the city’s Pride march. On grimmer issues, she has also been effective—bringing down the capital’s murder rate significantly during her time in office.

Who Sheinbaum or Gálvez would be on the world stage—and in bilateral U.S.-Mexico relations—is yet to be seen. One certainty, however, is that the annual “three amigos” summits between the United States, Mexico, and Canada will soon seem a little less like an awkward college fraternity reunion. The White House might want to start updating Mexico’s invitations so that they end with an “a.”

Return to Full List

---

June 6-9

Europe’s Most Boring Parliament Gets Ready for a Continentwide Vote

This year will see a record number of domestic elections around the world. The European Union has decided to up the ante—holding a supranational vote across its 27 member states.

For all its claims that Europe is at the vanguard of democracy and human rights worldwide, the EU’s institutions themselves are remarkably opaque and bureaucratic. And only one offers EU citizens a direct say over the bloc’s decision-making: the European Parliament, based in Strasbourg, France.

That parliament will hold elections between June 6 and 9, when EU voters elect 720 representatives to five-year terms. The number of seats fluctuates between elections but cannot total more than 750, plus the president; in 2019, voters chose 705 members to the body. Seats are apportioned to member states proportionately based on their populations. Germany, the continent’s biggest country, claims 96; midsize Portugal gets 21; and tiny Cyprus has just six.

While Europeans vote according to national guidelines and parties, their domestic parties are members of broader pan-national coalitions. The most prominent—in order of seats held—are the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), the center-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists & Democrats (S&D), the pro-business Renew Europe camp, the Greens, and—however ironic it may seem in an EU body—newer Euroskeptic groups such as European Conservatives and Reformists as well as Identity and Democracy. The Left also counts a few dozen members. The Parliament is headed by President Roberta Metsola, a member of the EPP from Malta.

Despite its size, the European Parliament has little authority compared with national-level legislatures. Lawmakers generally do not suggest EU laws; they consider budgets and legal proposals made by the European Commission in Brussels. The Parliament also cannot unilaterally pass legislation—and must instead agree to pass measures with the Council of the EU. Arguably, the most important responsibility of the European Parliament is approving the European Council’s choice for president of the European Commission, the EU’s chief executive. The current commission president is Ursula von der Leyen, a German EPP member.

Europeans tend to be more apathetic about EU votes than those in their own country. For most of the 2000s, turnout hovered in the 40 percent range, though it surpassed 50 percent in 2019. That was in part because of the rise of the far right; particularly in the post-Brexit era, many Euroskeptics saw elections to the European Parliament as a way to undermine the EU from within. The EPP and S&D lost their majority in the body thanks to the rise of smaller groups.

This year’s contest will be the first EU-wide vote since the United Kingdom formally left the bloc—and Ukraine began membership talks with Brussels. Turnout is once again expected to be higher than usual. Fears about the far right have only increased; they are one reason French President Emmanuel Macron reportedly withdrew his support for a free trade deal between the EU and the South American customs union Mercosur. Members of France’s powerful agricultural lobby were opposed to the tentative agreement, and Macron’s chief opponent, the far-right Marine Le Pen, sought to capitalize on the issue.

Many Europeans are also antsy about the EU’s expenditures on projects such as the green transition as well as conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. Though the Parliament cannot do much, it can obstruct many of Brussels’s usual priorities—and typically expansive budget.

Von der Leyen is also reportedly seeking another term in office and will need the Parliament’s support to get there. She may need to convince the EU’s only democratic body that she is herself a democrat. In October 2023, Politico quoted an anonymous EU diplomat who said von der Leyen had “increasingly been behaving like a queen.”

Return to Full List

---

Fall, Date to Be Confirmed

Tunisia’s Backsliding Democracy Turns on Migrants

In the summer of 2023, the European Union inked a deal with Tunisia to reduce the flow of migrants to the bloc. The North African country is the latest focal point of the EU’s attempts to stem migration from across the Mediterranean. Brussels will provide some $1.1 billion to the government in Tunis, disbursed in a series of smaller installments, to help the country cope with high migrant numbers, upgrade defenses such as the coast guard, and—ultimately—keep Africans from reaching Europe’s shores illicitly. In 2022, Tunisia overtook Libya as the top departure country for migrants who arrive in Italy by boat.

The agreement—whose durability is already in doubt amid new disagreements between Brussels and Tunis—is enormously controversial. That’s because Tunisia is a rapidly backsliding democracy with an ever-growing slew of alleged human rights violations to its name. EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell wrote in an internal email obtained by the Guardian that “several member states expressed their incomprehension” on the EU-Tunisia deal.

The last time I wrote about Tunisian elections, the year was 2021, and President Kais Saied had just completed a power grab that critics labeled a “coup.” Until then, the presidency in Tunisia—often considered the Arab Spring’s only democratic success story—had been a ceremonial role; a state of emergency instituted by Saied allowed him to rule by decree.

In 2022, Saied made his role official in a constitutional referendum that transformed Tunisia from a hybrid presidential-parliamentary to a suprapresidential system with nearly unchecked executive authority. (The moves mirror Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s attempts to consolidate power.) Among other changes, journalist Simon Speakman Cordall reported ahead of the vote, “the new constitution grants the president immunity throughout his tenure and states that he cannot be questioned about his actions as president.”

This year’s Tunisian presidential election—expected to be held sometime in the fall—will be the first such contest following Saied’s constitutional changes. Since the last presidential vote in 2019 that brought Saied to power as a political independent promising change, Tunisia has declined from a flawed democracy to a hybrid regime, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index.

The country’s leading opposition figure, Rached Ghannouchi, is languishing in prison on spurious charges observers say are politically motivated. Saied, a stalwart secularist, has taken aim at Ghannouchi’s moderate Islamist Ennahda party, which was instrumental to Tunisia’s recent democratization and later became its largest political bloc. Amid the drudgery of parliamentary deliberation, Ennahda was not able to pass much decisive policy, frustrating many Tunisians. Saied justified his expanded powers by alluding to what he claims is the “corrupt machinery of established party politics” and the inefficacy it brings, researcher Johannes Lang wrote in Foreign Policy in December 2022.

Though Saied’s anti-democratic moves have provoked public backlash and protests, he also has his fair share of supporters. It’s difficult to peg Saied’s approval, as opposition boycotts of recent elections have rendered the results almost comically lopsided. The 2022 constitutional referendum received nearly 95 percent backing at the polls with only around 30 percent turnout. Now, there are indications that some in Saied’s base—which includes young voters—may slowly be turning on the president, journalist Tharwa Boulifi reported in Foreign Policy last February.

Democratic backsliding is far from the only issue plaguing Tunisia. Human rights advocates have also condemned the country’s treatment of Black people. Tunisian authorities have exercised “escalating violence and abuses against sub-Saharan African migrants,” Amnesty International warned in July 2023, and Saied has gone so far as to espouse versions of the far-right “great replacement” theory. “Many security analysts believe that Saied’s incendiary remarks are devised to whip up racial hatred at a time of fierce opposition toward his one-man rule,” FP’s Nosmot Gbadamosi, the author of Africa Brief, reported last March.

The Tunisian government’s well-documented xenophobia is part of why the EU-Tunisia migrant deal is so controversial. In addition to bolstering Tunisia’s border security, that agreement was intended to offer a lifeline to a country in economic turmoil. Tunisia is saddled with debt amid rampant inflation. But the government has been unable to agree to a deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), its most prominent creditor—ostensibly a condition for receiving EU funds. Saied, who rejected an IMF deal last October, has attacked the fund with anti-Western rhetoric, providing cover to an escalating domestic crisis.

With his chief opponent Ghannouchi—and others—behind bars, Saied’s reelection campaign this year may end up being a well-choreographed political charade. Per his own constitutional reforms, Saied is eligible to run for one more five-year term in office. He will need an absolute majority to win; if not, a runoff vote will be held.

So far, only one candidate besides Saied has declared an intention to run. In November 2023, Olfa Hamdi, the former CEO of Tunisia’s national airline Tunisair, announced that she would stand as the candidate of her self-founded Third Republic Party. Hamdi said she aimed to “build a broad coalition ensuring a successful peaceful political transformation.”

Hamdi may be asking for too much. Saied has already announced that he will prohibit foreign election monitors from observing Tunisia’s presidential vote. A country the Economist called a “light unto the Arab nations” just a decade ago may soon be fading into darkness.

Return to Full List

---

By the End of 2024, Date to Be Confirmed

Venezuela’s Strongman Wonders Whether to Risk Free Elections for Sanctions Relief

The Western Hemisphere’s textbook case of democratic erosion is Venezuela. The country—home to the world’s largest oil reserves—was once a wealthy petrostate and thriving democracy. Since the late 1990s, however, Caracas has descended into authoritarianism—first under President Hugo Chávez of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and now under his successor, Nicolás Maduro. The United States began imposing sanctions on Venezuelan people and institutions “that have engaged in criminal, antidemocratic, and/or corrupt actions” in 2005.

In 2019, the Trump administration ratcheted up those punitive measures in a campaign it called “maximum pressure.” The aim was to remove Maduro from power, Chatham House’s Christopher Sabatini wrote in Foreign Policy in July 2023. Maduro had been elected to a second term as president in 2018 in a contest Chile’s then-leader said did “not meet the minimum standards for a true democracy.” Alleging a rigged vote, opposition legislator Juan Guaidó declared himself Venezuela’s rightful interim president after Maduro’s inauguration in 2019.

The United States and some other countries initially joined in recognizing Guaidó, but over the years, he fell out of favor with the global community. It became clear that the 2019 Venezuelan presidential crisis was most likely a botched attempt at U.S.-backed regime change. Former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton—who served under President Donald Trump—told CNN in 2022 that he had “helped plan coups” and mentioned Venezuela as an example that “turned out not to be successful.” Guaidó now lives in exile in Miami after a dramatic escape from Venezuela; in January 2023, the White House confirmed that it no longer regarded him as Venezuela’s president.

Even as the Guaidó fad came and went, U.S. sanctions on Venezuela remained—and decimated the country’s economy. “From 2014 to 2021, Venezuela’s economy contracted by three-quarters; inflation soared at one point to an estimated annualized rate of more than 1 million percent,” Sabatini wrote. About half of the country lived in poverty as of late 2022. The combined political and economic crisis has created a refugee exodus from Venezuela that is comparable to Ukraine’s in size—but has received far less funding and support from international actors, FP’s Robbie Gramer reported in September 2022.

The U.N. refugee agency estimates that there are about 7.7 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants worldwide. While Latin American countries have taken the lead in integrating them, they have also become bargaining chips in the U.S. immigration debate. In September 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, now a Republican presidential candidate, shipped a group of Venezuelan refugees to Martha’s Vineyard in a widely condemned political stunt. Last fall, the Biden administration announced it would offer temporary protection to nearly 500,000 Venezuelan migrants already in the United States.

It’s no secret that Washington wants to reduce migration throughout the Western Hemisphere. But that’s not the only reason policymakers are reexamining U.S. sanctions policy toward Venezuela. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine—and a Western embargo on Russian oil—U.S. policymakers have turned their eyes to Caracas’s ample reserves of the fossil fuel. In November 2022, the United States allowed Chevron to begin limited operations in Venezuela—signaling a potential U.S. reentry into the country’s oil sector.

The United States agreed to explore ways to lift sanctions on Venezuela in exchange for a commitment from Maduro that he would return to stalled negotiations with the opposition, held in Mexico City. There was an urgency to that requirement: The aim of the talks, which had been held on-and-off since 2021, was to agree to conditions for Venezuela’s planned 2024 elections.

Then, last October, a deal was announced: The Maduro government agreed to hold free elections in the latter half of this year. In exchange, the United States lifted sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector. (They can be reinstated if Caracas does not meet the deal’s requirements.) FP’s Catherine Osborn, the author of Latin America Brief, called the compromise a “breakthrough.”

It’s unclear whether the much-heralded agreement will bear fruit, however. Ryan C. Berg of the Center for Strategic and International Studies called the deal a “huge gamble” in Foreign Policy in December 2023, as sanctions relief preceded any major moves by Maduro. Berg warned that Maduro may already be violating the accord by failing to lift bans on political opponents. In late December, the United States conducted a prisoner swap with Venezuela that saw 10 Americans and 20 political prisoners released from incarceration in the country. Washington sent a jailed Maduro ally to Caracas in return.

Ahead of this year’s expected vote, the Venezuelan opposition—called the Unitary Platform—has rallied behind candidate María Corina Machado, a self-styled libertarian who counts former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as one of her political role models. But Venezuelan authorities last summer banned Machado from holding office for 15 years due to her support of Guaidó.

Now, Maduro is in a bind: If he wants enduring sanctions relief from the United States, he will have to allow Machado to run. Her chances of ousting him in a free and fair election are good. Machado is considered popular and won the opposition primary with more than 90 percent of the vote.

So far, Machado is the only declared candidate in the yet-to-be-confirmed presidential race. Maduro is widely expected to run again as the PSUV’s candidate; Venezuelan presidents serve six-year terms and face no limits on reelection. Only a plurality is required to win.

Maduro appears to be worried about his prospects. He recently called a referendum on whether Venezuela should incorporate the disputed (and oil-rich) Essequibo region, which falls within Guyana’s international boundaries but which most Venezuelans claim as their own. The move—approved by 95 percent of voters but with disputed turnout—was widely perceived as an attempt to curry nationalist fervor ahead of the expected elections. Now, there are genuine fears of a land war in Latin America. The things autocrats will do to stay in power.

Return to Full List

---

By the End of 2024, Date to Be Confirmed

Sunak’s First-Ever U.K. Election as Prime Minister Will Likely Be His Last

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak confirmed just weeks ago that the United Kingdom would hold general elections sometime in 2024. They’ll be Sunak’s first-ever contest as the country’s premier—and could expose his weaknesses as an unelected leader.

In recent years, Americans disillusioned with their maladroit political system have often looked across the pond for some reprieve and solidarity. Since the last general elections in 2019, British politics have appeared almost equally dysfunctional. The country completed its divorce from the European Union and cycled through a revolving door of Conservative prime ministers.

The Trump-friendly Boris Johnson, who won the 2019 vote, may be the most notorious of that lot. An enthusiastic Brexiteer, Johnson exited No. 10 Downing St. in September 2022 after revelations that he had hosted parties while Britain was locked down during the COVID-19 pandemic; the so-called “Partygate” scandal has spawned official government investigations and been a source of tabloid intrigue ever since. Then came Liz Truss, whose tenure was famously shorter than the shelf life of a head of Tesco lettuce. Now, Sunak is in the driver’s seat.

The “nightmare on Downing Street,” as FP’s Sasha Polakow-Suransky called it, has mirrored Britain’s chaos of adjusting to a post-Brexit era. The death of longtime monarch Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022 seemed to confirm that the U.K. was entering uncharted identarian territory.

By almost all accounts, Brexit has been bad for the country. Once a global superpower, Britain’s departure from the EU downgraded the country’s place in international relations and trade. London has attempted to craft an agenda called “Global Britain,” but it appears to be more bark than bite. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Dalibor Rohac argued in Foreign Policy in May 2019, “Brexit is the most reliable way of ensuring that the U.K. does not take advantage of opportunities that the global economy has to offer and that the country instead spends another decade engaged in unproductive navel-gazing while the rest of the world moves on.”

At home, the economic impacts of Brexit have hit Britons hard. Annual inflation in October 2022 was calculated at a 41-year high of 11.1 percent, according to Britain’s Office for National Statistics, and the effects of the cost of living crisis are tangible. In February 2023, journalist Liz Cookman reported in Foreign Policy of rising energy prices, food shortages, and growing poverty. “If the winter of discontent does sequels, we’re in it,” Cookman wrote. “Chief among all the culprits is the destructive effect of Brexit and bad governance.” The vaunted National Health Service is also at an impasse as conditions deteriorate and doctors go on strike.

The government has decided that illegal immigration—which is on the rise—is the source of many of these woes. Under far-right home secretaries, London has promised to “stop the boats” crossing the English Channel from France. Its most controversial move was the 2022 signing of an agreement to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda. The measure earned condemnation from many observers, including the United Nations, who said it could amount to a human rights violation. In Foreign Policy in June 2022, journalist Andrew Connelly called the policy a “cruel, expensive, and pointless spectacle.”

The Rwanda deal has been held up in court, but Sunak is still trying to pass it with some modifications. Whether or not it is adopted, the Conservatives have succeeded at making immigration a key election issue. In recent YouGov surveys, U.K. voters listed their top three concerns as the economy, health, and immigration and asylum.

Sunak can technically call general elections at any time, but he appears poised to let Parliament carry out almost all of its five-year term. That’s likely because the Conservatives have long been in a polling slump. Since 2021, the party has trailed the opposition Labour Party in surveys, according to YouGov. The latest data on voting intention, from Dec. 13, 2023, showed Labour with twice as much support as the Conservatives: 44 percent to 22 percent. Smaller parties such as the pro-business Liberal Democrats, Scottish National Party, and Greens scored 11 percent or less.

Labour is led by Keir Starmer, who stepped in after popular—but divisive—former head Jeremy Corbyn resigned following a catastrophic electoral defeat to Johnson, when Labour received its lowest number of seats in 84 years. Starmer and Corbyn do not get along. Corbyn has since been expelled from Labour after he denied that antisemitism within the party was a problem under his leadership. Starmer has shifted Labour to the right compared with his predecessor—more of a centrist pragmatist and less of a socialist ideologue than Corbyn.

Given Labour’s lead in opinion surveys, there is considerable speculation as to what kind of a prime minister Starmer might be. Britain hasn’t been led by Labour since Gordon Brown, who stepped down in 2010. Since then, the country has gotten much poorer—and the world more dangerous.

“He is an ambiguous figure,” journalist Jamie Maxwell wrote of Starmer in Foreign Policy in July 2023, “a onetime human rights lawyer who took a soft line on police brutality when he served as Britain’s top prosecutor and a former advocate of integration with Europe who now insists that Brexit was necessary.” Starmer’s foreign policy is equally murky: In May 2023, FP’s Azeem Ibrahim noted that “there’s not yet a coherent worldview in evidence.”

But a leap into the unknown may be desirable for Britons, who have grown weary of Conservative leadership and never-ending political drama. Whenever Sunak does choose to call general elections, voters will elect 650 members of Parliament in single-member constituencies using a first-past-the-post system. It would be the first—and could be the last—national vote he ever oversees.

Return to Full List

---

Graphic sources: Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa, Mongolia Weekly, France 24, Somaliland Government, Americas Society/Council of the Americas, Al Jazeera, Barron’s, Khmer Times, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, South Korean National Election Commission, Ada Derana, Election Commission of Pakistan, Nikkei Asia, Wahltermin.at, International Foundation for Electoral Systems, Embassy of Belgium in the United Kingdom, Finnish Ministry of Justice, Lithuanian Central Electoral Commission, National Democratic Institute, AFP, Palau Election Commission, Reuters, Economist Intelligence Unit, Freedom House, Worldometer

Correction, Jan. 4, 2024: A previous version of this article misstated the respective length of Senegalese President Macky Sall’s two terms in office. It also misstated the immediate electoral ramifications of Ousmane Sonko’s 2023 conviction. This article has also been updated to clarify the legal uncertainties created by Senegal’s recent constitutional amendments.

This article appears in the Winter 2024 print issue of FP. Read more from the issue.

This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of Foreign Policy. Subscribe now to support our journalism.