Throw the Bums Out
Eight years ago this week, cartoonist Alex Norris posted a three-panel webcomic that was probably intended as a not-too-veiled comment on the 2016 election—but one that is even more relevant in today’s political world.
In it, a character surrounded by furniture and various knickknacks declares “I want things to be different,” and then proceeds to throw everything around the room. Now surrounded by a messy pile of broken stuff, the character delivers the punchline: “Oh no.”
The one thing we can say for sure about 2024 is that voters worldwide want things to be different. Time will tell how that works out.
Donald Trump’s victory and the Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate in this week’s elections joined a remarkable trend of political turnover across the democratic world this year. The most interesting thing about that trend is the lack of any apparent ideological shift behind it.
Voters don’t seem to be turning against progressive or conservative parties, and (despite how Tuesday’s results in America look) the trend doesn’t seem to be discernibly right or left. The Conservative Party got rocked in the United Kingdom’s election this summer, as the left-wing Labour Party claimed a majority in Parliament for the first time since 2010. Meanwhile, Germany’s Social Democrats (a left-wing party) got bulldozed in the European Parliamentary elections.
The trend continues beyond the U.S. and Europe, and includes a landslide defeat suffered by South Korea’s conservative party in April, and the loss by South Africa’s liberal African National Congress party, which had ruled for three decades (and was responsible for ending apartheid). Cast your gaze back to 2023, and the run of anti-establishment upsets includes the historic victory by Javier Milei in Argentina.
Even in places where ruling parties have stayed in power this year, they’ve earned a smaller share of the vote than in previous elections. That includes races in India, Japan, Belgium, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Lithuania, according to an analysis of election results by the Financial Times.
John Burn-Murdoch, the data reporter who crunched those numbers for the Financial Times, says this run of losses by incumbent parties is unprecedented in the modern world. “This isn’t just the first time since [World War II] that all incumbent parties in developed countries lost vote share,” he posted on X. “It’s the first time since this data was first recorded in 1905. Essentially the first time in th
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