The year of polls will change the modern world order
Six hundred years before the birth of Christ, the world’s first democracy was born in Athens to challenge aristocracy. A new system, called demokratia gave political power to male Athenians, read male landowners, to select their Assembly. To get Athenian citizenship and pass judgments in criminal and civil matters, a jury comprising 200 to 5,000 citizens headed by a randomly chosen judge, held a secret ballot. Each juror got two small stones, one whole for ‘Yes’, and with a hole through its middle for ‘No’. Two urns were kept in the room. Each juror would drop his stone in either urn depending on his choice. The word ‘psephology’, the statistical study of elections and voting patterns, owes its origin to the Greek word psephos, for ‘stone’. However, current psephologists seem to be stoned. Perhaps, their statistical models are too hazy to comprehend the change in voting attitudes.
It would be safe to say that 2024 is the Year of Elections. The largest democracy on earth—94.50 crore voters as on January 1, 2023—will crowd polling booths across India. They are likely to gift Narendra Modi a third contiguous term: the only premier who holds that record is Jawaharlal Nehru. American voters will choose their 47th president: public opinion favours Donald Trump. Mexico will make its choice this year amid a raging immigration crisis.
The year will see 40 national elections, in which 41 per cent of the world’s population will take their pick in Europe, France, Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Ukraine and Finland, South Africa, Algeria, Tunisia, Ghana, Rwanda, Namibia, Mozambique, Senegal, Togo and South Sudan and more. The Paradox of Democracy 2 024 is that while the number of voters is up, the people will not have much of a say in autocracies. Elections due this year in Russia and Iran are a guaranteed hoax: Putin controls both the polls and the results, while Iran’s murderous Ayatollah regime has already disqualified 25 per cent of opposition candidates. Defiant little Taiwan votes, standing up to the looming shadow of avaricious China. Earlier this month Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi barred the Leftist politician Ahmed Tantawy, his only plausible challenger, from contesting for the presidency. Voters in many such ‘democracies’ are disheartened—turnout is likely to be low, since they know the results are preordained. Pakistan’s national election will test its fragile democracy and failed economy to the limits.
In most of these countries, pure ideology will be replaced by empirical concerns. The Outsider or the Other will be the common enemy; the main threat to indigenous culture, historical accreditation and economic growth. The generic sentiment is against Islam, the self-ghettoisation of Muslims in Europe and the UK, and their attempts to police citizens through Sharia and a refusal to adapt to the values of the nations of their refuge.
This is compounded by racism, since the majority of immigrants are Muslims from dark-skinned lands. By the time 2024 is on its way out, geopolitics and social structure will have changed definitively. Voters will redefine the meaning of democracy and decide the course of the clash of civilisations, which erupted to the fore on the morning of September 11, 2001 when 19 terrorists crashed planes into the Twin Towers in New York City and the Pentagon. In India, it was on December 6, 1992, when Babur’s Masjid in Ayodhya was demolished by Ram’s legion, which won a war lost centuries ago. The 20th-century elections were about nations and decolonisation. This century belongs to nationalists and nationalism.
ravi@newindianexpress.com