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Hard to pin down

Despite the immense diversity in political systems, traditions, and circumstances, one clear pattern emerged globally: a rejection of incumbent parties and leaders. For the first time ever, incumbents lost vote share in all 12 of the developed Western countries that held national elections. In all developed countries, incumbents’ average vote share declined by an average of about 7 percent—also a record, and more than double the average drop in any year during or after the Great Recession.

That we’d see any pattern this stark all around the world is remarkable. It also raises the question of what other patterns might there be behind it. Is there more to what happened globally than a wave of anti-incumbency?

Steven Levitsky is a professor of government at Harvard University and the co-author of the 2018 book How Democracies Die. Levitsky says one of the most notable is in voter support for parties in the broad category of the populist right: Overall, these parties gained support—even if India’s Bharatiya Janata Party, in office for 10 years, saw its share of the vote unexpectedly decrease and had to form a coalition to keep its governing majority. Another pattern is among the leaders of the populist-right parties coming to power, particularly in Western Europe: Many liberals and liberal media outlets had expressed fears that these leaders would undermine democracy, as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, India’s Narendra Modi, and other prominent populist-right leaders have done in recent years. But while some of these new European leaders do advocate certain discriminatory policies, even among their own citizens, none are challenging the foundational institutions of democracy like the independent judiciary, free media, or regular and fair elections—raising the question of how these new leaders relate to the Orbáns and the Modis of the world at all …

• “Even since before Covid, the debate about public discontent has been split. One group sees the main cause as pushback against social and cultural changes, primarily against greater diversity and other challenges to existing social and gender hierarchies. The other side sees the main cause as economic, going back to the Great Recession and the consequences of globalization and trade with China.”
• “I haven’t seen anyone—including me—explain global discontent in a convincing way. My guess is that social media are very consequential. I see two main mechanisms that seem to be at work: Social media appear to be eroding public trust in authorities and institutions, and they make it much easier for political outsiders to win office. Before the internet, it was almost impossible for a political outsider to raise the money and get the media access necessary to reach voters.”
• “Political scientists may worry about democracy, but voters don’t prioritize abstractions like institutions, rules, or norms. They vote for a bunch of different reasons—sometimes they’re unhappy with the status quo; sometimes they really like or dislike particular candidates; sometimes they have strong attachments to a particular party; sometimes they want very specific policies.”

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All three countries have let the United States government know they’re not available for seizure. Fortunately for Canada, the U.S. is in no position even to try taking it, and Greenland is covered by the European Union’s security guarantees. But could Panama be different?

In international relations, Trump has exhibited a tendency to open with maximalist threats, later to settle through normal negotiations. But there’s at least a strategic through line between his invocation of the Chinese presence in Panama and America’s diplomatic past: Historically, great-power rivalries have, in moments, given Washington a rationale to threaten or even launch military interventions in nearby countries.

Sean Mirski’s We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety, and the Rise of the American Colossus traces the history of how the United States pushed the European empires out of the Western hemisphere. It happened, Mirski writes, through a series of “security dilemmas,” in which the U.S. feared that European powers, if given the least foothold in the Americas, might potentially use it to strike America in the future. In essence, Washington faced the option either to let its rivals establish a presence in weak neighboring states or preemptively to do so itself through military intervention or outright conquest.

So, too, in Panama. In the late 1870s, when French engineers organized the Compagnie Universelle to build a canal through the country, the U.S. objected on the grounds that it’d give a foreign power control over one of America’s most vital maritime routes. “The politics of this country,” said President Rutherford B. Hayes, “is a canal under American control.”

By the turn of the century, the U.S. had ejected the European powers from the region altogether. And in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt sponsored a revolution in Panama against Colombia in order to complete the canal under American control. But as Mirski notes, Roosevelt went for a far more aggressive course than what security considerations alone really needed. In other words, Trump’s rhetoric may be strange, but it isn’t new: Great-power rivalries have long afforded their rivaling great powers the pretext to play rough with smaller countries.

—Gustav Jönsson

• On January 28, Serbia’s prime minister, Miloš Vučević, resigned amid massive, nationwide protests against government corruption. The protests began after the roof of a train station in Novi Sad collapsed, killing 15 people, following a recent renovation led by a Chinese firm: “What began as small gatherings in Novi Sad have ballooned and spread to Belgrade as students, teachers, and other workers have turned out in the capital in their thousands to blame the station disaster on corruption within the government of the president, Aleksandar Vučić.”
• New Zealand is the latest country to offer “digital nomad” visas, joining a list that includes Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Spain, and Portugal. Economic Growth Minister Nicola Willis stressed, “These are jobs they hold offshore and that they’ll be able to stay connected to while in New Zealand.” They “won’t be competing for Kiwi jobs.”
• In April, Beijing will host a half-marathon competition for humanoid robots, which authorities in China hope will stimulate research into robotics. The government of Hangzhou, for example, has promised to “accelerate the construction of an integrated innovation system and the whole industry chain of research and development, design, manufacturing and application of humanoid robots.”

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