The year 2024 has been a year of many elections, and one of massive upsets. The collapse of the pro-Macron faction in France, the humiliating loss of votes for the ruling parties in India and Japan, and, of course, marked the headline making defeats of the 2 incumbent parties in the UK and US, among other countries. The trends have shown that voters seem to be lashing out against the establishment in nearly every case with a few exceptions such as Tunisia and San Marino, and a lot of the time, far-right parties like the Rassemblement National in France and the Patriotic Alliance in South Africa were the main beneficiaries. This leads to the inevitable question of how all of this came to be. The answer, it turns out, is a story decades in the making.
The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism
The roots of 2024 can be found in 1973 when Chile, under the leadership of Augusto Pinochet, became the first country in the world to implement Neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is a broad group of political reforms that aim to maximize the amount of economic life that happens under the private market and is also associated with greater control of the economy by the private sector. Starting from the 1970s, more and more countries began to implement Neoliberal economic policies, either as a result of economic mandates, as in the iconic reigns of Thatcher and Reagan over the UK and US respectively, military coups as in the original Chilean case, or through the intervention of international financial institutions as happened with much of Latin America and Africa through what were known as “structural adjustment programmes,” where financial aid was tied to Neoliberal reforms.
While the impacts of Neoliberalism have been numerous, for our purposes, there are two that matter for understanding the current electoral predicament. The first was a change in the nature of work. In less developed countries, many of which were kept underdeveloped by former colonial powers, you had a rush of new manufacturing jobs as a result of companies seeking lower labor costs and taking advantage of reduced trade barriers. These new manufacturing jobs, while better-paying than agricultural labor, often involved grueling work in usually unsafe working conditions, with governments not able to regulate industry for the welfare of workers in order to stick to Neoliberal orthodoxy. The most notable example of this phenomenon can be found in the export of clothes manufacturing to countries like Bangladesh, and the rise of manufacturing in Vietnam to US$384 Billion in 2024, which is more than the entire GDP of Vietnam in 1980.
In developed countries, cutbacks on government regulation and the decline of trade unions, often aided by government policy, led to a shift from manufacturing to the service sector as the main locus of economic activity. According to Anthropologist David Graeber, this has led to a divide between a largely blue collar workforce that can be said to produce real value but under poor working conditions, and a largely white collar workforce that has attained a middle class standard of living but suffers a crisis of meaning at the perceived pointlessness of their jobs. In all of these cases, you end up with new classes of people who are largely dissatisfied with their working life either due to low pay, bad working conditions, or complete meaninglessness.
The other major change was the financialization of much of the economy. As a result of declining wages and deregulation of the financial system, more transactions have been done on credit. People started buying commodities using their credit cards, homes were largely bought using mortgages, and even university education was starting to be financed via debt. Eventually, this entire system came crashing in the year 2008. As a result of bad loans, the entire economy came crashing down, and many lost their livelihoods due to the poor decisions of corporate executives and bankers. Moreover, since governments tended to react by bailing out banks using public money, the downturn caused massive anger at the economic system, beginning an era of massive resentment by voters worldwide.
The crash, dubbed the “Great Recession” in what can only be described as a fitting homage to the other world-changing market crash in the 1930s, though technically over in 2009, did not see a full recovery until the 2010s in much of the world. In particular, this era saw the global number of unemployed people reach above 200 million for the first time, with global trade nearly grounding to halt as shipping volumes fell by 50%. While on its own a massive blow for the Neoliberal order, what happened next intensified the trends. A mere 12 years after 2008, in 2020, a second global recession hit the world. This time, it was caused by COVID-19, a health threat that much of the world was unprepared for. Governments around the world had trouble getting to grips with it initially and implemented unpopular lockdowns and social distancing measures to contain the spread of the virus. This time, 400 million jobs were lost worldwide, and oil prices as low negative US$30 per barrel in slime cases in spite of a contraction of oil supply by OPEC. Although the crisis was said to officially end in 2022, that same year saw the Russian invasion of Ukraine, worldwide sanctions on Russia, and hence rising oil prices. As well, Ukrainian wheat exports dropped, making that staple more expensive as well, rising an astonishing 24% from the previous year.
Although less relevant to Neoliberalism itself, it should be pointed out that the escalation of the Israel-Palestine conflict in late 2023 saw many cry foul at the perceived hypocrisy of political elites in many western countries. The governments of the west were seen to have made life harder for working people in the name of protecting Ukrainian freedom, while simultaneously supporting Israel as it committed what had been seen as a genocide in the eyes of many.
79 Years Later, the Far Right Returns
In the year 1945, the defeat of Fascism, and the unveiling of the horrors of the Holocaust, left the far right utterly discredited. Moreover, in the Eastern Bloc, Fascism was seen as a particularly degenerate form of Capitalism, and hence suppressed alongside other subversive ideologies. As far as decolonizing countries were concerned, Fascism was similar to the colonial systems that they were actively trying to break away from.
As much as the world said “never forget” in the beginning, the scars of the past began to fade away. As such, right-wing political parties were able to start shedding association with the horrors of the past and gain some electoral success by campaigning on contemporary issues, such as the rise in immigration to Europe and opposition to authoritarian politics in developing countries. One early example of this, Vlaams Blok in Belgium, led to the coining of a new political term: Cordon Sanitaire. Derived from a medical term for a quarantine aimed at preventing the spread of infectious diseases, mainstream Belgian political parties hoped that refusing to work with their new right-wing colleagues would prevent the spread of this extremist policy. Such an approach also became common in other countries as well, since it was felt that collaboration with the far right would legitimise their ideology.
Although well-intentioned, by not letting right-wing parties take part in government, political elites ensured two outcomes. First, these far-right parties wouldn’t get any of the blame for policy failures, including the perceived disasters of Neoliberalism mentioned above. Second, this gave these political parties a reputation for being uniquely anti-establishment. Similarly, policies of suppression of fascism and adjacent ideologies in authoritarian socialist regimes meant that far-right ideologues were associated with campaigns to end authoritarian rule alongside campaigners for democracy. Notably, the initial cordon sanitaire led Vlaams Belang (the successor to Vlaams Blok) to be seen as the only true opposition and rise to become the second largest party in Flanders. As well, the Arab Spring initially led to the rise of Islamist groups like Ennahda and the Muslim Brotherhood due to their role in opposing these regimes for decades on end. Come 2024, right-wing parties like the French Rassemblement National, the Brexit Party in the UK, and Donald Trump’s campaign in the US secured massive gains.
With that, the two main trends of the 2024 election have been explained. However, there is one question left unanswered.
Why Didn’t the Left See Similar Gains?
Given that the elections of 2024 primarily saw votes against the status quo rather than for anything, one can’t help but wonder why left-wing parties didn’t see similar gains. The answer requires one more story.
Left-wing parties in many Western countries, as well as other democratic countries like Japan, saw a shift away from hardline stances after first Khrushchev’s condemnation of his predecessor Stalin, and then, the violent response to a socialist revolution within the Eastern Bloc in the form of the Prague Spring. Hence, a new tendency began to develop known as Eurocommunism, which saw moderation in the stances of many left-wing political parties. Moreover, in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, ending the Cold War. Then, the Soviet Union fell apart two years later. With that, similar to the discrediting of the right in 1945, it was now the Left’s turn to be politically disqualified. In particular, the last days of the USSR saw it beset with problems arising from over centralisation, which due to the intense focus of the Soviet Union and its Leninist ideology as the basis of all debates within socialist political parties meant that the ideology as a whole was painted with the same brush.
As a result, those left-wing parties that had political relevance moved closer to the center and adopted more of the Neoliberal consensus. The result? Many of them were seen as too close to the economic establishment come 2024.
Those left-wing parties that did manage to win—MORENA in Mexico, the Broad Front in Uruguay, and National People’s Power in Sri Lanka—maintained stances broadly critical of Neoliberalism, presented themselves as populist parties, and were strongly able to contrast themselves with the Neoliberal consensus.
Conclusion
As that is how we get to now. Although each election saw its own unique dynamics, this common story, decades in the making, hopefully has shone a light on the overall trends and better equipped you to understand our current political reality.
