The News
More than 70 countries held an election in 2024, but the year was also marked by more than 160 anti-government and election related protests, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Global Protest Tracker.
Some of the incumbents did not survive the popular unrest: A student-led uprising in Bangladesh culminated in the downfall of longtime Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was ousted from power by rebel forces after years of stalemate in the country’s civil war. Others, like Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu, managed to hold on to power through weeks of protests triggered by soaring inflation and energy costs.
SIGNALS
Elections were a key driver of civil unrest
More than 1 billion people cast a ballot in 2024: While many elections were largely secure, in some places citizens’ anger over their “organization or outcome” was a significant driver for unrest, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace noted. In many countries, the incumbents suffered electoral losses, but so did the appeal of democracy more broadly: The number of people who say representative democracy is a “very good” way to govern has declined since 2017, according to the Pew Research Center. This decline may be tied to the after-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a “big wave of ill-health, disrupted education, disrupted workplace experiences and so forth [are] making people less happy everywhere,” a political scientist told The Associated Press.
Bangladesh remains at a crossroads
Four months after a student-led revolution in Bangladesh overthrew Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, the country “at a crossroads,” as groups with different agendas vie for power, a columnist wrote in The Daily Star. Bangladesh’s path to liberal democracy is blocked by a “culture of mutual legitimization” that makes finding common ground near-impossible, another noted: A multiparty government focused on economic stability and educational reform may be preferable to rushed elections that risk intensifying divisions, he argued. More than 61.1% of Bangladeshis want elections within a year, according to a Voice of America Oct. survey, but an overwhelming majority also said they want “all necessary reforms” to be done beforehand.
Nigeria’s August protests less ‘organic’ than previous demonstrations
The August #EndBadGovernance protests were triggered by soaring inflation, cutting across ethnic and religious lines: “If there is hunger in the land, the hunger that the Christian is feeling is not different from the hunger the Muslim is feeling,” a pro-democracy activist told Christian Science Monitor. Yet the protests seemed less “organic” than 2020’s #EndSars demonstration, an Abuja-based analyst told openDemocracy, in that rather than forcing the government out, they were “an attempt to parlay the threats of this action into forcing the government to do something different.” Meanwhile, President Bola Tinubu has continued to defend his controversial economic measures, telling reporters recently that he has no regrets about removing fuel subsidies, Bloomberg reported.
