The elections in India, Turkey and the US in 2024 point to the rapidly shrinking liberal political space in democracies.
Despite the enormity of the threat to a secular and inclusive vision of politics, the elections in India and Turkey, however, suggest that possibilities of liberal resilience do exist. The US, however, has failed the resilience test.
Opposition fought back in India
Since 2014, India has increasingly turned autocratic under the leadership of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) which nominally leads the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
The Indian elections in 2023 and 2024 point to three significant factors that may have enabled the Centre-Left Indian National Congress (INC), which leads the Indian National Developmental Alliance (INDIA), to defy majoritarian politics in a limited way.
First, a secure leadership or coherent coalition that rose above competing political factions.
Second, a clear secular narrative with a citizen-friendly stance.
Third, working closely with like-minded groups in civil society.
The state-level election results in India support these claims.
When the leadership, narrative and the civil society favored the INC in Karnataka (2023) and Telangana (2023), the party surprised the ruling BJP. The Telangana victory of the Congress was modeled after the one in Karnataka.
When, on the other hand, the Congress lacked a clear secular narrative and was ridden with factionalism, it lost the elections that could have yielded substantially different results.
This was evident in Rajasthan (2023), Chhattisgarh (2023), Madhya Pradesh (2023), Haryana (2024) and Maharashtra (2024).
It took the INDIA bloc some time to emerge as a coalition of diverse political parties on the eve of the June 2024 Parliamentary elections.
The autocratization of the incumbent government seems to have inspired some coherence within a diverse opposition alliance.
The INDIA bloc thus became the rallying point for the forces opposed to majoritarianism and favoring social justice.
Civil society organizations played a significant role, even under adverse conditions.
This political mobilization restricted the BJP-led NDA to 240 seats in a 545-member lower house of parliament, 32 short of a simple majority in the general election.
The BJP, for the first time since 2014, needed coalition partners to form a government.
This was a favorable result for the political opposition, considering the substantial incumbent advantage of the BJP. The Congress won 99 seats and INDIA bloc’s 234 MPs sat on the Opposition benches.
For the first time since 2014, the Indian Parliament in 2024 looks relatively more balanced.
Turkey’s hyper-presidential system
Less than a year after its defeat in the 2023 presidential elections, Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) scored a major and rather surprising victory against the ruling alliance led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which first came to power in the 2002 general elections, has gradually captured state institutions over the past two decades.
It has eroded democratic safeguards and placed the media, civil society and academia under greater control.
As a result, under Erdoğan's rule, democracy in Turkey has eroded and was replaced by a hyper-presidential system in 2018.
Erdoğan's recent victory over the joint opposition candidate in the 2023 presidential election is seen by many as a watershed moment that might lead to the consolidation of the authoritarian regime in Turkey.
Contrary to widespread expectations, the March 2024 elections were a significant upset for the ruling alliance.
The ruling AKP suffered its worst defeat in over two decades and was overtaken by the center-left CHP for the first time.
Despite the disintegration of the main opposition alliance after the 2023 defeat, the main opposition party won 37.8 percent against the AKP's 35.5 percent, taking control of 24 out of 81 provinces.
As a result, the CHP currently controls 6 out of 7 of the largest metropolitan municipalities and numerous others in the Anatolian heartland, including some provinces long held by the ruling party.
Meanwhile, the pro-Kurdish DEM (the People’s Equality and Democracy Party) and the pro-Islamist New Welfare Party won 10 and 2 provinces respectively, reducing the ruling alliance's local control.
The defeat of the ruling alliance can be attributed to several factors.
As the stakes were lower in the local elections, some pro-government voters strategically voted for the opposition parties to protest against poor economic conditions.
After several years of high inflation and a weak currency, Erdoğan switched to an orthodox economic agenda and placed the burden of reducing inflation on middle-class and poor voters in major cities.
Against the government's poor economic record, the CHP's strong performance at the local level in the municipalities attracted higher levels of popular support.
In Istanbul and Ankara, which have been governed by the CHP since 2019, the municipal governments provided voters with effective services and generous social assistance.
The worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza also angered some pious Muslim voters, who switched their support to the New Welfare Party to punish the government's refusal to cut trade links with Israel.
Majoritarianism triumphs in the US
The US, however, failed the resilience tests in 2024.
The re-election of Donald Trump as President in 2024 is widely recognized as a low point in American democracy.
It was well known by April 2024 that the Biden presidency’s public appeal had reached its nadir. It took a long time for the Democratic Party to chose Kamala Harris as Biden’s successor.
Neither did Harris’s progressive agenda work for attracting the poor find any purchase, nor did the Democratic Party appear racially more inclusive.
Under these conditions, majoritarianism triumphed as more Black and Latino voters favored Trump over Harris in the 2024 Presidential contest than in the past.
Threat remains
Majoritarian leaders are adept at creating the convenient myth of a majority community threatened by the minority. This is a political ploy for garnering the majority vote.
Majoritarianism poses a threat to rich, middle-income and low income countries alike.
The lessons from India, Turkey and the US suggest that autocratisation has no relationship with the per capita income of a country. Even adopting a softer version of majoritarian nationalism is likely to defeat the liberal cause in the long run.
No longer can one live with the belief that capitalist societies produce democracy. Even advanced industrialized countries today are not immune to the majoritarian threat.
(Mukherji is Professor and Chair of Modern Politics of South Asia in the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University in Heidelberg. Esen is Associate Professor of Political Science at Sabanci University in Istanbul. Prasad, who is PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University in Heidelberg, assisted in writing this article. This article was originally published under Creative Commons by 360info)
