DC Edit | Global Elections 2024: Historic Wins and Setbacks Shape a Changing Political Landscape
The year of the great global elections in a raft of countries ranging from the most democratic to the least has thrown up many surprises, but perhaps the best of them could be the Mexicans electing Claudia Sheinbaum as their first woman president in 200 years. The swing from the right of, say, the Russian elections, in a centrist move might gladden the hearts of many around the world rendered anxious by the possible fallout of elections in a direction more inclined to authoritarianism.
Mexico’s president-elect, a Jew with a doctorate in energy engineering and vast experience in politics as mayor of Mexico City, may have to deal first with rampant violence in a country, with drug wars the everyday normal leading to kidnappings and murder, and more than 30 politicians killed in its latest election cycle. It is interesting that the winner’s closest rival was another woman in Ms Xóchitl Gálvez, but it is being freely said that Ms Sheinbaum would be saddled with working in the shadow of her mentor and current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The other end of the spectrum to more liberal politics in Mexico was the South African elections in which the African National Congress, once led by the heroic vanquisher of apartheid Nelson Mandela, suffered a major setback in losing its majority after nearly three decades in power and having to explore the politics of coalition.
The discredited former President Jacob Zuma appears to have wreaked his revenge against President Cyril Ramaphosa with his fledgling party securing nearly 15 per cent of the vote. In a rapidly declining economic setting in which inequality is at its starkest with more than half the Black population living in abject poverty and joblessness being extremely high in the country, the task for any coalition government is cut out if it is to avoid social strife amid an already bleak scenario of endemic crime.
The ANC seems to have achieved little in six years after Mr Ramaphosa took over from Mr Zuma even as the nation has suffered from long power cuts and virtually no water as in Cape Town and other regions. When finding a way back to power with a workable coalition itself is a herculean task, the lot of anyone heading the country at this juncture can be imagined.