In this ‘year of elections,’ democracy is holding its own

During this so-called “year of elections,” during which the citizens of 64 countries have gone or will go to the polls, there has been great focus on whether once-stable democracies would hold firm or be dragged down by a rising tide of nationalist populism. More than halfway through the year, democracy and authoritarianism appear to be playing to a draw.

Election results have been studied for factors explaining the support for right-wing nationalist parties where they are in ascendance. These parties offer a common chorus of cultural nationalism, anti-immigrant and anti-“woke elite” refrains and encourage anti-system, anti-democratic actions.

Is it, as many have argued, the revenge of the forgotten places where people are economically struggling, ignored and looked down upon? Is it a politics defending traditional cultures and identities? Straightforward racism and xenophobia? Or is it simply, as many have suggested, a reaction against unpopular incumbent leaders?

As Jeffrey Anderson and Andy Westwood, my partners in the Transforming Industrial Heartlands Initiative, have written before, these factors and forces intermingle. But our reading is that all these election results have one thing in common: they are largely a response to untreated economic inequalities — real gaps in opportunity within countries that are often still growing. The support for right-wing ethnonationalist leaders and their policies is particularly strong in regions within democracies that once boasted a solid middle class and vibrant communities, but now see relative decay and decline.

India, the world’s largest democracy, appears to have reined in wannabe-strongman Narendra Modi — perhaps in part due to his push to pervert India’s secular democracy into a Hindu religious state. But many analysts credit the driving force to be the growing gap between India’s haves and have-nots, and the stagnant economic opportunities for many castes and in many regions — divides that Modi has failed to address.

Somewhat similarly, the left-wing and diminished center parties in France narrowly unified to prevent an government led by ascendant right-wing nationalist parties. But as was well documented in the run-up to the election, the right-wing National Rally party, as well as some extreme left-wing populists, found support in the decaying former industrial bastions, small towns, rural reaches and otherwise left-behind parts of France.

In the U.K., Labour came to power after 14 years in a clear rejection of a Conservative government’s failures on the economy, diminished living standards and rising inflation. However, Labour’s victory was accompanied by a surge for the new right-wing Reform Party — including in the hollowed-out industrial regions of Northern England. The Reform Party’s strength shows that many voters — particularly in these “left-behind” regions — are more than eager to support the extreme right’s rhetoric and recipe for change, which includes blaming immigrants — not the lack of investment in people, communities and new jobs that is at the root of their condition.

The 2024 European parliamentary elections, while not the right-wing sweep that many had feared, also reflected the pattern of struggling regions and their residents being among the most receptive and supportive to the anti-system, nationalist culture warrior candidates as support for right-wing candidates grew.

Anxiety is also high in Germany around upcoming national elections, with support for the nationalist right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland growing. This is hard to fathom in a country once brought to ruin by the Nazi Party — and a country that has arguably done a better job than most in equalizing economic opportunity for its citizens. But even here, economic anxiety appears instrumental to informed observers.

Saxony State Secretary Thomas Kralinski, asked recently what lay behind the recent spike in voting for Alternative für Deutschland, explained it well: “Just when the ground resettled under people’s feet after the big disorienting change of unification, we were hit by other shocks! First the Great Recession, then crisis of COVID, of migration, of inflation, and the war with Ukraine, now the green transformation. People are feeling anxious that maybe their little bit of luck right now could disappear again. They are worried. And they express their fears with their votes.”

This openness to a resentment driven-political solution — blame someone else for your lack of opportunity, the degradation of community and a perceived assault on your identity, versus a policy program focused on fixing economic problems — is perhaps most vividly embodied in the continued appeal of Donald Trump in the U.S.

And this politics is even more authentically animated by Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance. He is part of the white working class who — fleeing Appalachia and other rural hinterlands — found a good life, for a time, in the industrial Midwest. This better life in the industrial heartland was available for a generation or two, until it degenerated into shuttered factories, lost jobs, run-down communities, drugs and family pathologies.

However, when he first articulated the root of this culture of despair in his book “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance did not blame an immigrant invasion, globalists or woke-elite culture warriors for the plight of factory town residents. He fixed responsibility on the distressed members of the white working class itself, namely their personal inertia and victim mentality. Now Vance has done a 180-degree spin, feeding the vein of white working-class resentment with more blame-someone-else “heroin,” something he once accused Trump of doing.

Kamala Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), offers the persona of a “regular guy” from small-town America who talks up his record of delivering solutions for working families. While the choice of vice presidential candidates will likely not be determinative to the election, the contrasting populist recipes are vividly on display.

It may seem like a political whipsaw, when center-left parties toss out right-wing populists in Poland and the UK, while the hard-right nationalists rally in France and nationalism spikes in Germany. But the underlying dynamics remain the same.

Economic unease and anger at a “system” that doesn’t deliver for them causes voters to push back against those in power — even to the point of being willing to support an anti-democratic extreme.

John Austin is the former president of the Michigan State Board of Education and is affiliated faculty with the University of Michigan.