In India, a powerful leader wins another term but sees his party’s majority vanish. In South Africa, the governing party is humbled by voters for the first time since the end of apartheid. In Britain, a populist insurgent barges into an election that is shaping up to be a crushing defeat for the long-ruling Conservatives.

If there is a common thread halfway through this global year of elections, it is a desire by voters to send a strong signal to the powers that be — if not quite a wholesale house cleaning, then a defiant shake-up of the status quo.

Even in Mexico, where Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and the hand-picked successor of the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was elected in a landslide last Sunday, voters were rewarding the forces that had uprooted the country’s entrenched establishment only six years earlier.

With 1 billion-plus people going to the polls in more than 60 countries, some analysts had feared that 2024 would pose a fateful test for democracy — one that it might fail. For years, populist and strongmen leaders have chipped away at democratic institutions, sowing doubts about the legitimacy of elections, while social media has swamped voters with disinformation and conspiracy theories.

In some of the biggest, most fragile democracies, leaders such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey had been regarded as close to invincible, using appeals to nationalism or sectarianism to mobilize supporters and bending institutions to suit their purposes.

Yet now, Modi and Erdogan have both had their wings clipped. Soaring inflation, chronic unemployment and uneven economic growth have widened inequality in India, Turkey and elsewhere, frustrating voters who have shown a willingness to buck the establishment.

FILE — President Vladimir Putin of Russia is applauded as he arrives for his inauguration for a fifth term in Moscow on Tuesday, May 7, 2024. Putin retained his presidency in a rubber-stamp presidential election with no real competition. (Nanna Heitmann/The New York Times)

“We do have electoral systems that are producing outcomes the governing parties didn’t want,” said Ben Ansell, a professor of comparative democratic institutions at the University of Oxford. “They’ve all been destabilized by a tricky economic environment, and behaving like strongmen hasn’t saved them.”

Modi and Erdogan remain in power, each now in his third term. But Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, lost dozens of seats and will have to govern in a coalition with two secular parties. Turkey’s opposition struck a blow against Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party in April, winning a string of local elections and solidifying its control of important cities including Istanbul and the capital, Ankara.

A bounce back

“In a lot of countries where there’s been talk of backsliding, that’s where we’ve seen a bounce back,” Ansell said. “For Modi and Erdogan, taking the sheen off their infallibility was very important.”

With so many elections in so many countries, it is dangerous to generalize. Russian President Vladimir Putin rolled up 88% of the vote in a landslide reelection victory in March that spoke less to Russian public sentiment and more to the ability of an autocrat, facing no meaningful opposition, to stage-manage a show of support for his war in Ukraine.

In Europe, far-right parties are expected to perform well in European Parliament elections, which began Thursday. Analysts said they did not believe this would jeopardize the political center that has governed Europe in the post-World War II era. And Poland provided a source of reassurance last November, when voters pushed out its nationalist Law and Justice Party in favor of a more liberal opposition.

Opposition supporters celebrate early election returns at the Indian National Congress headquarters in New Delhi on Tuesday, June 4, 2024. In Turkey, India and elsewhere, where some feared authoritarian leaders would consolidate power, democracy has proved surprisingly resilient. (Atul Loke/The New York Times)

Still, the success of far-right figures like Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, attests to the enduring appeal of populism.

“Populists and right-wingers will continue to make gains and strike fear into the European political establishment,” the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, said in its analysis of the top risks of 2024.

Shake-up in UK, too

Britain’s general election was shaken up Monday when Nigel Farage, a populist politician, pro-Brexit campaigner and ally of former President Donald Trump, announced he would run for a seat in Parliament under the banner of his Reform U.K. party, which has a strident anti-immigration message.

That will add to the headache for the Conservative Party, which has lagged the opposition Labour Party by double digits in polls for nearly 18 months. Reform, which is fielding candidates across the country, could siphon off Conservative votes among those who blame the party for a weak economy and rising immigration numbers since Britain left the European Union in 2020.

Some critics argue that the Conservative Party’s problems stem from its free-market policies, which they say have disillusioned voters in disadvantaged parts of Britain and set it apart from right-wing parties in Europe or Trump’s Make America Great Again movement in the United States.

More fundamentally, though, the Conservatives have been in power for 14 years, and they face the same pent-up dissatisfaction with the status quo that fueled the recent elections in India, South Africa and Turkey.

Unorthodox choices

In some countries, the urge to break with the past has led voters to make unorthodox choices: Javier Milei, a flamboyant libertarian economist, swept to power in Argentina last November with a promise to close its central bank and wage an all-out assault on what he described as a corrupt political “caste.”

Some analysts argue that similarly disruptive forces are driving the presidential race in the United States, where a comparatively healthy economy and the advantages of incumbency have not spared President Joe Biden, who faces a neck-and-neck challenge from Trump even after the former president was convicted of multiple felonies.

Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and former mayor of Mexico City, greets supporters at an election night event in Mexico City, on Sunday, June 2, 2024. Sheinbaum won a landslide victory this week, succeeding President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and promising to continue his anti-establishment policies. (Fred Ramos/The New York Times)

“It’s not about left versus right, it’s about the status quo versus change,” said Frank Luntz, an American political strategist who has lived and worked in Britain. “You can’t buy a house in the U.K., the NHS doesn’t work,” he said, referring to the National Health Service. “In the United States, you can’t afford housing or health care. It’s about broken promises, year after year after year.”

That sense of betrayal is even more acute in South Africa, where the African National Congress, or ANC, has governed since the start of democracy there in 1994, piling up majorities even as the economy and social infrastructure crumbled. Last week, voters finally rebelled, driving down the ANC’s vote share to 40%, from 58% in the last national election in 2019.

Stagnation in South Africa

Among their biggest complaints is the lack of job opportunities: South Africa’s unemployment rate — at 42%, including those who have stopped looking for work — is one of the highest in the world. Stagnation has widened the country’s already profound inequality.

India’s election was a comparable anti-incumbent revolt, even if Modi’s BJP is still the largest party in Parliament by a wide margin. The party’s campaign spending was at least 20 times as much as that of its main opposition, the Congress Party, which had its bank accounts frozen by the government in a tax dispute on the eve of the election. The country’s news outlets have been largely bought off or bullied into silence.

And yet, the results showed Modi, 73, losing his majority for the first time since he took office in 2014. Analysts said that reflected widespread dissatisfaction with how the fruits of India’s economy have been shared. While India’s steady growth has made it the envy of its neighbors — and created a conspicuous billionaire class — those riches have not flowed to the hundreds of millions of India’s poor.

The government has handed out free rations of wheat, grain and cooking gas. It offers home water connections, subsidizes building supplies and gives farmers cash. But it has not tackled India’s inflation or unemployment, leaving hundreds of millions of people, especially women, chronically out of work.

The temple did not work?

There is also some evidence that Modi’s appeals to Hindu nationalism were not as potent as in previous elections. The BJP’s candidate did not even win the constituency that is home to the lavish Ram temple, built on grounds disputed by Hindus and Muslims. Modi inaugurated the temple just before the campaign started, hoping it would galvanize his Hindu political base.

The economy figured into Mexico’s election as well, but in a very different way. While overall growth was disappointing — averaging only 1% a year during López Obrador’s term — the government doubled the minimum wage and strengthened the peso, lifting millions of Mexicans out of poverty.

“People vote with their wallets, and it’s very obvious there’s more money in the wallets of almost everybody in Mexico,” said Diego Casteñeda Garza, a Mexican economist and historian at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Still, analysts said, there was also a desire among voters to cement the change that López Obrador, a charismatic outsider, symbolized when he came to power in 2018. Even as Sheinbaum, 61, vowed to continue her mentor’s policies, she cast herself — Mexico’s first female and Jewish president — as a change agent.

The New York Times News Service