This is going to be a subversive year worldwide, as is the next. New ideas will take hold of both the dynamics of governance and the peoples’ hand in it, and in the popular imagination.
The US is a stark example of the confusion and perplexity that precedes change.With the presidential election six months away, US President Joe Biden’s ratings are at a low 38.1 percent. His putative contender, Donald Trump, has 43.3 percent approval ratings.
Biden is seeking to keep his seat by bizarrely yo-yoing between to-the-hilt support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and symbolically paradropping food aid to starving Palestinians against Israel’s wishes. This uncertain grandstanding over a foreign issue is impacting his domestic standing. For perhaps the first time in semicenturial history, happenings outside the continental US—events in which the US military does not have boots on the ground—will dictate the choice of president in November.
This is a signal change in US polity. Instead of the US coming into the world, which is its default mode, the world will come into the US. Trump is hyperventilating about the wrong thing: it’s not the Mexican migrants that the US should be worried about, it’s global-policy intrusion into the famously inward-looking lay American psyche.
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is panicking as his approval rating sinks to 21 percent, with the general election probable between September and November this year. His support for Israel is widely viewed in his country as unconscionable ingratiation of one of the most impunitous arch-criminals in world history, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Sunak’s transatlantic decision-maker, Joe Biden.
Sunak’s consternation led him to address the press outside 10 Downing Street in which he likened the huge win by the Workers Party of Britain leader George Galloway in a parliamentary by-election as a triumph for “extremism”. It was a stunning display of anti-democratism and it flatlined Sunak’s popularity.
But Sunak is not the UK’s only problem. Like the US, it is stuck having to choose between two fundamentally similar opposites—Sunak and Labour leader Keir Starmer. Both are being primarily defined not so much by their domestic programmes as by their foreign policies: to wit, the Israel-Palestine war. Although their destinies depend on their domestic praxis, their ideological stands, and indeed votes, are predicated on foreign policies—which are illiberal, Islamophobic and smelling high of a modus vivendi. The world has come calling to electoral Britain.
In France, no one had predicted that President Emmanuel Macron’s rating could fall lower than the 33 percent clocked in July 2023. But today it stands at 24 percent. Like Sunak, he seems to be captive to a popularity death wish. In late February, he verbalised the idea of sending French troops to Ukraine to fight against Russia. His NATO allies dismissively turned him down. Incensed by the rejection, he upped the ante by referring to Ukraine’s allies as “cowards”.
What Macron, on his second and last iteration as president, seems to be looking for is a post-presidential innings as a policy doyen—and of a continuation of his closeness to the French arms industry, which has not made the killing that US arms manufacturers have from the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts. Only 37 percent of French citizens approve of a French military engagement in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Macron has been increasing France’s defence budget, ending decades of pruning.
German Chancellor Eric Scholz will be up for re-election in 2025. The German military support for Ukraine might stand at 47 percent, but Scholz’s strident Ukrainophilia at the cost of German existential comfort has reduced his approval rating to 20 percent. The state is in direct conflict with the prevailing popular mood.
In Iran, the Global North’s bête noire in the Middle East and North Africa region, the recent democratic vote shows us a deeply-dissatisfied polity. Elections to the Iranian parliament, the Majlis, and the Assembly of Experts, the group that will decide who succeeds Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, were carried out on March 1. While the results are yet to be announced, the abysmal voter turnout of 41 percent is a firm pointer to voter aporia or phlegmatic fatalism.
Meanwhile, we have a social-media-savvy benign dictator in El Salvador. Charismatic 42-year-old Nayib Bukele won a landslide second term in February. He immediately changed his social media introduction to read “world’s coolest dictator” and “philosopher king”. But his term has been riddled with questionability. The allegations against him would be familiar to Indians: compromising the courts, legislation to concentrate power in his hands, an undeclared state of emergency that led to the incarceration of more than 1 percent of the population, and a (highly popular but legally dubious) gang crackdown. “It will be the first time in a country that just one party exists in a completely democratic system… The entire opposition together was pulverised,” Bukele said after his second victory. He is the world’s most popular leader, not Narendra Modi.
These leaders have similar problems with baseline voters. Small farmers and cattle farmers in the US are truculent about Biden’s clueless handling of agriculture. “I’ve got your back,” Sunak rather insincerely told a National Farmers Union conference, promising to “change the culture” in government. Farmers in France have for weeks been up in arms against Macron, heckling him and clashing with the police. Unlike in India, which is also going through chronic farmers’ protests, Macron promised to establish floor prices for each crop. Farmers in Germany are militantly unhappy with Scholz for his plan to end diesel subsidies to them. Farmers across Europe are protesting EU policies, bureaucracy and business behaviour.
Year 2024 could well be the global year of the farmer. What is inescapable is that it will be the year of the vox populi (the voice of the people) versus vox rei publicae (the voice of the state).
Kajal Basu,
Veteran journalist
(Views are personal)
(Kajalrbasu@gmail.com)