*Note: For additional insights on Bangladesh's election results, check out the full Q&A with SIS professor Tazreena Sajjad.  

2024 is a busy election year for South Asia, with India, Pakistan, Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Bhutan also all heading to the polls. Bangladesh was the first in the region to hold national parliamentary elections on January 7. According to emerging results, the incumbent political party, the Awami League (AL), has won by a landslide, claiming about 75% of the country’s parliamentary seats. This continues to make AL leader Sheikh Hasina Bangladesh’s longest serving prime minister—having won five times, four of which have been consecutive victories—and the longest serving female head of a country in the world.

At one level, the fact that a former British colony born of a genocidal war that has experienced famine, devastating environmental disasters, and violent military coups, including the military rule between 1975 and 1991, has continued to hold parliamentary elections since it regained democracy in the 1990s is notable. In the last almost-three decades, particularly under the AL administration, Bangladesh has managed to pull millions of people out of poverty through extensive social and economic welfare programming, met several of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and is on track to achieve the current Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It has made notable strides in gender parity, particularly in areas of child and maternal mortality, education, and politics, and established one of the largest manufacturing and textile hubs of the world, particularly in the garments industry. The construction of the Padma Bridge—the longest bridge across the River Ganges, connecting the southeast of the country to the capital—with its own funding and the country’s first and most extensive metro rail system has demonstrated its capacity for self-reliance and the potential for ongoing economic progress. In short, within a narrow period of time, Bangladesh has become a success story of globalization and neoliberalism.

At another level, the elections also signal AL’s unrestrained ability to achieve electoral victory through highly undemocratic means and at all costs, leading its critics—both national and international—to argue that rather than a democracy, Bangladesh has morphed into an electoral autocracy. The fact that, like in 2014, the Bangladesh National Party—the largest opposition party headed by former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia—again boycotted the 2024 elections because the AL government ignored calls for a neutral caretaker government during the election period means that elections, rather than being a “backbone of a democratic process,” are being instrumentalized as a means for further consolidation of AL’s position in Bangladesh politics, leaving little to no room for dissent. As such, the 2024 elections, rather than being a healthy exercise of expressing the democratic will of all Bangladeshis with different political choices, become important as the means for the continuation of AL rule—even with significantly low voter turn-out.

In 2024, with the conclusion of the national elections, Bangladesh stands at a crossroads with significantly weakened democratic structures and faces the reality of being a one-party state.

—Tazreena Sajjad

El Salvador's February 4, 2024, election is extremely consequential because the autocratic president Nayib Bukele is brazenly conducting a first for El Salvador: running for re-election in a country where the Constitution prohibits a second consecutive term. Bukele is getting away with this illegal election in part because he controls the legislative and judiciary branches. Moreover, in a country plagued by gang violence for years, Bukele has high popular support because he has thrown over 70,000 people in jail over the past 21 months—a mix of alleged gang members along with innocent people. The latter includes five civil society leaders who were at the forefront of the successful campaign to make El Salvador the first nation on earth to ban mining to save its rivers. The key foreign policy question about the election is whether the United States, the European Union, and other governments will speak out in protest of Bukele's illegal election and human rights abuses or whether they will remain silent for geo-political reasons (notably immigration and China). Sadly, I wager that silence will trump what should be a concern for the rule of law and human rights. 

—Robin Broad

While the Eurobarometer shows that levels of support for the EU have remained stable over the past decade, recent domestic elections, as well as opinion polls, indicate that the upcoming European Parliament elections from June 6-9, 2024, may result in more fragmentation and polarization. Turnout for European elections is traditionally lower than national elections, with turnout dropping between 1979 and 2014 before rising again to 50% of the eligible electorate voting last time in 2019.  

While the composition of the European Council—the co-legislative body—is pretty much fixed in terms of its political composition at this point, legislation requires agreement from both the Council and Parliament. As populist parties gain ground across member states, there has been a shift among voters in Europe with support for limiting asylum, reducing immigration, and supporting industrial policy over climate issues. This will have significant effects on the composition of the European legislative agenda for the next five years. The two main parties—the European People’s Party (EPP) and the European Socialists and Democratic group (S and D)—have dominated elections over the past 25 years, but with divisions over fiscal, industrial, and climate policies, as well as foreign policy disputes, the European Parliament faces a challenging environment, especially if the Identity and Democracy (ID) far-right group does well in the polls and gains more seats.

—Michelle Egan

India’s 2024 general election to be held in April and May of this year is consequential not just for India and millions of its diaspora scattered around the world, but also for the world at large. The election comes at a time when we are witnessing a global shift to the right and the alliance of major right-wing leaders. By many measures, the reigning prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which espouses a Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) ideology, is set to win a third term. In individual state elections in 2023, particularly across the northern “Hindi belt,” the BJP swept the elections in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan. Only in one state, namely Telangana, in the south—a region of the country that has historically been a bulwark against Hindutva ideology—did the opposition, the Congress party, win in 2023.

Beyond state-level results, current polls indicate that Modi enjoys overwhelming popularity. The BJP’s Islamophobic rhetoric emboldening vigilante violence against minorities, the massive roll-out and party branding of welfare schemes, and the sizeable expenditure on elections and vote buying have all yielded electoral dividends among a Hindu majority population. This is not good news for India’s non-Hindu minorities, particularly its Muslims. While state-level elections and polls are not definitive indicators of who will win—and it remains to be seen how India’s more marginalized and populous castes vote—what is clear is that the face of India has forever been changed by BJP’s last two terms, which started in 2014. Should it win a third term, the ideals of secularism, equality, fraternity, and even democracy and the rule of law championed by its founding leaders, including by the anti-caste intellectual and constitutional architect, B.R. Ambedkar, will be in grave danger.

—Malini Ranganathan

 

I study media and misinformation. From my perspective, 2024 is a very important election for India because participation in civic life is more online now than ever before. This means the nature of campaigning has changed, but it also means that there are more tools and techniques available for political parties and candidates to persuade—and thereby manipulate—public opinion and vote choice. Consequently, the election is crucial because it will be a referendum on how much Indian voters value democracy and how much they are willing to subvert it in favor of their own partisanship. 

—Sumitra Badrinathan

Mexico’s 2024 elections will be very significant. The incumbent President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, or AMLO, as he is known, seeks to preserve his legacy by supporting the election of his chosen successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, and thus assuring the continuation of Mexico’s “fourth transformation,” as AMLO calls the reforms he initiated. A determined opposition seeks to reverse many of AMLO’s reforms and policies and warns that AMLO seeks to weaken Mexico’s democracy.

Mexico’s elections are also very important for the US. No other country in the world has more impact on the daily lives of Americans than our southern neighbor. Mexico is the US’s largest trading partner and the entryway for massive amounts of deadly illegal drugs and huge flows of immigrants. Managing these key issues will be debated sharply in both the US and Mexican elections as will be the strength of democratic practices in both countries.

Mexico’s June 2024 elections also will be large. Ninety-eight million Mexicans are eligible to cast their ballots on June 2 for some 20,375 positions at the local, state, and national levels. Rightly, most attention will be focused on the choice of a new president and the election of an entirely new national congress (500 deputies and 128 senators). Although Mexican law does not allow the incumbent president, Andres Manual Lopez Obrador (AMLO), to run again, he remains high in the polls, with approval ratings over 60 percent, and he is throwing strong support to his chosen successor, Claudia Sheinbaum. Polls show Sheinbaum with a roughly 20 percent lead over the candidate of the opposition center-right coalition, Xochitl Galvez, at present.

AMLO has indicated that if his coalition, named “Let’s Continue Making History,” wins a large enough majority in the new Congress, he will recommend a series of constitutional reforms that would have the effect of weakening independent checks and balances in Mexico and centralizing more power in the hands of the president. 

AMLO has been very critical of the Supreme Court, the National Elections Institute, and other autonomous institutions that were created over the years as Mexico was building democracy. However, AMLO has not had the two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress needed to approve the constitutional reforms he would like to see. His attempted reforms have sparked very large counter-demonstrations, but he has persisted in his calls for constitutional change. 

During AMLO’s tenure, the independent global indexes on democracy and related measures, including corruption, have reported deterioration and backsliding in the quality of Mexico’s democracy. The 2023 World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index tracks a decline in Mexico’s rule of law score during AMLO’s term and currently ranks Mexico at 116 out of the 142 countries measured. Thus, the outcome of Mexico’s elections could be very important for the strength of Mexico’s democratic institutions. Not surprisingly, many in Mexico see the 2024 elections as a test for maintaining the strength of its democracy—echoing themes being heard in the US presidential election campaign.   

In Mexico, the formal national campaigns have not yet begun, but there has already been a good deal of pre-campaign activity. Currently, AMLO’s candidate, Sheinbaum, and the coalition led by AMLO’s Morena party have a substantial lead over the three-party opposition coalition known as the “Broad Front for Mexico” and their candidate, Galvez. Many observers believe the gap can be narrowed, but the question is, for both the presidential vote and the eventual congressional majorities, by how much?

AMLO and his coalition have some clear weak spots on which the opposition will focus. One of the most evident is public unhappiness with the government’s handling of Mexico’s serious public security problems. In a recent poll by the respected Reforma newspaper, 52 percent rated AMLO’s handling of organized crime as “bad”, and only 23 percent gave the president a good rating.

The widespread crime and poorly working justice system bring much violence to Mexican communities—over 30,000 homicides annually and over 169,000 since AMLO took office—and results in over 90 percent impunity for most crimes. 

This situation has severe negative effects on the US. It facilitates massive smuggling of deadly drugs, such as fentanyl. The latest data suggests that drug overdose rates in the US hit a new high of 112,000 in 2023. The seizures of lethal synthetic fentanyl at the US-Mexico border almost doubled from FY22 to FY23, and the fentanyl seized between FY21 to FY23 rose 241 percent. US-Mexico anti-crime cooperation has improved recently but remains far less effective than is needed.

Thus, both Mexicans and Americans have a serious interest in the kind of crime and drug policies that Mexico’s new government will pursue. Several American Republican politicians have already proposed using the US military to go after drug cartels in Mexico, which could easily spark a crisis with a Mexican government seeking to defend its sovereignty.

Given the recent large flows of migrants crossing Mexico, the US also has a very important interest in how good and willing a partner a new Mexican government will be in trying to tackle the very challenging cluster of issues involving the hundreds of thousands of migrants trying to enter the US through Mexico. 

Of course, if a Trump administration were to emerge from the US elections, we could see a much different and less cooperative US approach to dealing with Mexico on migration and drug smuggling. 

Crucially important is that across the same border, US-Mexico trade averages $1.5 million a minute supporting millions of US jobs. We cannot forget that despite all the problems, Mexico has become the US’s largest trading partner.

US-Mexico relations are so important to both countries that the governments will need to find a way to manage even very serious disagreements. The results of the elections, however, will make a big difference for good or bad in managing the challenges.

—Earl Anthony Wayne

Pakistan has been going through a turbulent political phase—its last elected government was abruptly removed from office, and its popular leader is still in jail. Commentators fear a return to martial law. This election should clear the air and give Pakistan an elected government which can then proceed to promote stability and prosperity within the country and better relations with its neighbors outside the country. Another looming question is how Pakistan will balance its international relations with China on the one hand and the US on the other. The elections need to clarify where Pakistan stands on the world stage. 

—Akbar Ahmed

It is rather easy to dismiss Russia’s presidential elections in March. Indeed, the results are a foregone conclusion, with Leonid Slutsky and Vladislav Davankov not having a snowball’s chance in hell of denying Vladimir Putin another term in office. Yet, this does not mean the vote will not matter.

Despite the regime becoming ever more so autocratic in recent years, Putin will be keen to preserve the appearance, if not the substance, of democracy for Russia. Moreover, this will be the first major vote since the start of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Besides projecting an element of normality and to help justify his decision to go to war, Putin will also be very keen to show all, especially the elites, that he maintains strong public support. At the very least, he will want to improve his tally from the last presidential election—77% of votes and 68% turnout—even if this means significant rigging of the numbers.  

—Garret Martin

 

Elections in authoritarian regimes like Russia play a critical role in demonstrating a leader’s power. They are less exercises in popular choice—since genuine rival claimants for power will not be on the ballot—than efforts to show that the state administrative apparatus, the political-economic elite, and the majority of the population will continue to show active compliance with the regime. After a botched invasion of Ukraine, two years of costly attritional war, an armed rebellion against Moscow (Prigozhin’s mutiny), price inflation, and restricted international travel, it is an open question whether hundreds of thousands of officials, journalists, teachers, low-level administrators, and others will do the work required to manipulate the election—and whether a majority of Russian citizens in all regions of the country will perform the act of compliance by turning out to cast a ballot for an aging Vladimir Putin. There are many pressures to do so, but when an act of resistance is as easy as staying home or casting a vote for a marginal candidate, hidden and private discontent can always emerge. A failure of Putin to win outright in the first round could trigger an end to his reign.

—Keith Darden

Why is this election important for Rwanda? I don't think that is the right question when talking about Rwanda and President Kagame's most recent presidential candidacy. President Kagame is seeking a fourth term, which he made possible after changing the constitution in 2015 to allow him to stay in power until 2034. When asked, he stated, "I would consider running for another 20 years. I have no problem with that. Elections are about people choosing." He has joined the list of African dictators who desire to remain at the head of their country for more than three decades. Let's be clear, winning an election with 99% of the vote (an obvious indication of election malpractice) makes him, at least, an authoritarian, if not a dictator.

The question should be: "How different is Rwanda now compared to the last time it held an election?"

On one hand, Rwanda has not changed. Rwandans constantly live in fear for their lives. On the other hand, the image and reputation of President Kagame's Rwanda is shattering. We can see that the UK Supreme Court's decision regarding the UK-Rwanda treaty would have sent asylum seekers to Rwanda. The Supreme Court raised serious concerns over their safety and the potential that they will be sent back to their home country. In addition to that, many scholars, activists, former RPF members, INGOs, and organizations have written about the serious human rights violence in Rwanda and abroad, including transnational repression, intimidation, kidnappings (see Paul Rusesabagina), and extraterritorial killings. Let's not forget Rwanda's link to M23 in DRC.

Now, Rwanda has entered an election year, with President Kagame as likely the only real candidate for the presidency. That said, the people are not blinded by the changes made by Kagame and the RPF to rebuild the country after the 1994 atrocities. Rwanda can no longer do business as usual. 

—Claudine Kuradusenge-McLeod

It would be hard to overstate the importance of this year’s US election, as it may determine whether the United States remains a democracy. Donald Trump has already eroded America’s democratic norms and institutions. If he returns to the presidency, he will seek to take the country much further down the path of authoritarianism. On the other hand, if Trump is defeated, this will signal that democracy in America is still robust.

—Jordan Tama