Turkey and Senegal prove democracy is alive

We are four months into the great election year of 2024, in which several billion people are entitled to cast a vote. And it is already clear that somebody is doing rather well. Who is that, you may be wondering, the right or the left? Is it governments or oppositions, or populists or joke candidates? Is it really possible, from the votes so far cast by 543 million people around the globe in various forms of free elections, to identify who is doing well?

The answer is refreshing. It’s electorates who are doing well. On the whole, where they have a genuine choice, voters have been turning out in large numbers and delivering some serious surprises. They have been seeing through disinformation, refusing to be intimidated and when given a chance to give bloody noses to leaders who are complacent, corrupt, incompetent or autocratic, they’ve seized it. They are showing that democracy isn’t done yet.

A good example is Turkey, where President Erdogan — he of the creeping authoritarianism, media domination and ever-extended terms of office — was given the huge and unexpected shock of his main opponents being swept to victory across the largest cities. The scale of the victory of the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, suggested voters fully intended to show that political competition in their most pivotal of countries is back.

Most dramatic has been Senegal, where President Sall attempted the old trick of staying in office despite the expiry of his term. He had reckoned without the determination of his people. They turned out in vast numbers to support a court ruling against him and forced an election between new candidates, resulting in a peaceful transfer of power to the opposition. There are Trump supporters in America who could learn a lot from west Africa.

In Taiwan, the electorate faced an orchestrated campaign from China, in the form of military exercises, mass disinformation on social media and blatant demands not to elect a particular president. They defiantly elected him anyway, in an affirmation of their resolve to protect their way of life.

Elsewhere in the Pacific, the voters of the Solomon Islands have just delivered their own verdict on their government allowing excessive influence from Beijing, forcing their prime minister to step down.

The story goes on: in Pakistan, voters stunned the army and political establishment by giving big victories to independent candidates who had been prevented from running for Imran Khan’s party due to his politically motivated prosecution. In South Korea, a president seen as out of touch was humiliated by voters giving his opponents a sweeping majority in their parliament. Majorities across the world have voted, where they can, for fairness, standards and upholding their constitutions.

There are, of course, caveats to this, before we get carried away. Sham elections have been held by dictatorships in Russia and Iran, although in the latter the turnout fell so sharply that voters found a way to express their disenchantment.

Others, such as in Bangladesh, have not been judged fair and free. In Europe, populism has advanced in elections in Portugal and Slovakia. And it’s early days. In the 2024 election special, the night is young.

In the coming weeks, results will roll in from India, where the government is broadly popular, and South Africa, where it manifestly is not. The ANC looks set to lose its hitherto permanent majority post-apartheid, but voters in both countries lack a single nationwide opposition that presents a real choice. Most crucial of all for geopolitics comes the US election in November. Voters are clearly dissatisfied with the Biden/Trump choice before them but trapped in a system dominated by money, name recognition and partisan primary voters.

Voters, then, are doing sufficiently well one third of the way through the year that they merit a round of applause. But they can only keep up their efforts where there are coherent alternatives to choose from and where large numbers of them find it palatable to switch their vote if the occasion demands it — something deeply divided Americans now find very difficult.

This has lessons for us here in Britain. There is no doubt that in our own 2024 general election there are alternative governments and that huge numbers of voters are prepared to switch parties if necessary. In that sense our democracy is in robust health. But that is much less true in many of the local or mayoral elections taking place on Thursday, or in the devolved parliaments in Edinburgh and Cardiff. If we are going to devolve steadily more decisions, then it becomes correspondingly more important for local voters to be empowered, and not feel that one party is inevitably running their country or area for decades on end with nothing that can be done about it.

To hold mayors, councils and first ministers accountable, voters have to be able to break out of their Westminster election voting habits, allowing local democracy to develop its own choices. You can see voters trying to do this, for instance in the West Midlands, where a highly effective Conservative mayor, Andy Street, is polling sufficiently far ahead of his party to still have a chance of winning. Yet far too many mayoralties will be held for long periods by candidates who have much less merit but are elected because of the Westminster party to which they belong. As for the devolved parliaments, they have produced governments in Scotland and Wales that systematically underperform England but grow arrogant and lacklustre through feeling unthreatened.

In Scotland that may be about to change with the crisis now engulfing the SNP, but the parties will need to allow a wider menu of options across Britain if voters are to do their job. Is it unthinkable, for instance, for the Labour and Conservative parties to co-operate in ensuring an alternative government can be provided in future in Scotland? Can’t we allow local parties to endorse a good mayor from another party? Are there new parties that could be established purely at the regional level, overlapping with the national parties but ensuring a real choice for voters? And can we stop treating every local result as a prediction of a general election, which only encourages the idea that local leaders are of no consequence in themselves?

I always enjoyed meeting Jean Charest, who was Conservative leader in Canada, and then premier of Quebec — as a Liberal. That was because only the Liberals could beat the separatists in Quebec. He later ran for Conservative leader again. That’s a political system with a mature approach to devolution of power, and a country that survived.

It should be of some comfort that in elections around the world, voters are enthusiastically doing their job. But we have to give them the political culture and party system to let them do it.