Opinion

A critical analysis of key elections in 2024

It is almost as 2024 is refusing to go down in history as just another year in our calendar. Nothing can prove this more than at least seven upcoming elections, that will determine directly the leaderships over the lives of our planet’s seven billion people.

Thankfully, voters made sure some of these election results are good for them and humanity, however, some are turning out to be bad and others ugly.

We as human beings are always in a struggle on our planet to satisfy our needs for survival and thriving, and if we are not careful the upcoming elections in these seven nations risk reversing humanity’s progress all the way back to square one: India, US, Mexico, Iran, UK, South Africa, and Tunisia.

Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s newly elected president is not only the first female president in the whole of North America, she is the also the first environmental scientist and former Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to become president.

As the leader of the leftist Morena Party, she is likely to continue supporting an international policy favouring self-determination and diplomacy over violence, which means a continuing tension with the US over immigration and the support for genocide.

Tunisia successfully held presidential elections and upheld the rule of law. While the opposition to the current President Qais Said claims he is following pages from another long hot summer of a president-for-life playbook including inciting hatred and racism against his fellow Africans, there is still hope that there will be an upcoming election that restores a system of checks and balances.

South Africa chose to uphold the legacy of the world’s most respected freedom fighter and former president, the late Nelson Mandela. His African National Congress first loss of majority in three decades is a lesson in peaceful power-sharing, especially for the so-called Global South. In addition, South Africans chose to continue fighting against racism and apartheid by standing by the Palestinian people’s struggle against the US-backed most racist and violent ongoing occupation in modern history in Palestine.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants against the accused political leaders in the occupied territories are evidence that South Africa is not only on the right side of history but also deserves to be a global moral leader.

In less than one century, the UK has turned from the most culturally influential Empire that colonised almost two thirds of the world, to a superpower’s poorer sidekick and enforcer. Based on a decade of less capable Prime Ministers, it is likely that UK voters will only have one of two choices; an ideologically Islamophobic Conservative PM or an opportunistic Islamophobic Labor PM.

Two factors that would turn any democracy into a toxic democracy are an insurrection against the rules-based order, and projecting centuries of racism that cannot be practiced internally, against the rest of the world, and the US is suffering from both. As US democracy was recovering from the January 6, 2020 insurrection by the former President Trump’s supporters, its centuries long struggle with racism reared its head again, this time externally targeting people who are anti-genocide with bombs or the threat of bombs.

India’s charismatic leader and Prime Minister for the past decade Modi has led the country’s conservative BJP party in a winning streak against the less charismatic opposition Congress Party. This election marks a breakaway from India’s thousands of years a world leader in tolerance and science, to a follower in weaponising identity and supremacy ideologies against citizens labelled as “infiltrators”, inflamed by the ongoing Israeli occupation and genocide against Palestinians.

There is a great deal of objective criticism of universal human values, such as democracy, around the world because of our collective failure to uphold international law and stop conflicts around the world.

While we blame the UNSC and its veto powers for this, a better solution starts with choosing and supporting better global leaders, who do not incite hatred for the sake of holding on to power. While in 1945 our world came together to say Never Again, in 2024 we owe it to current and future generations to end genocides once and for all.