Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter > Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza

World Politics and Elections 2024

(1/3) > >>

Jubal:
Welcome back to another year in world poltics! 2024 will be a heavier duty year than 2023 for elections globally, and there's a lot of really major ones going on...

I think the first really notable election of 2024 might be Taiwan's presidency, which looks very tight between the one-china KMT and more Taiwan-independencey DPP candidates.

There's also UK and US elections which will be covered in their own threads, and an Indian general election where my expectation is that Modi will romp home again, but a big coalition of opposition parties aren't so far behind that a bad year for the BJP couldn't knock them out of power. Congress and its allies coming back into government would be a big deal if it happened, I think. We also have an election for the European parliament, which currently looks like it will mean a noticeable shift to the right (there's been speculation about the nationalist ECR becoming part of the Union's notional governing majority, perhaps replacing the Green/EFA, which would be a real change if it happened but we'll see). The right do need to maintain some of their current high polling to make that work though, and in Italy where they're in government and the Netherlands where they're trying to form one, they might not retain current numbers. At some point I think Austria is also up for elections, and Ireland could be though they might leave it to early 2025.

Jubal:
The DPP did win Taiwan's presidency! Though they lost control of parliament so that might create some issues for them. China are predictably not very happy about this turn of events.

In less democratic news, the Awami League won the Bangladeshi election by a landslide due to having suppressed the opposition very heavily.

dubsartur:
Al Jazeera has a story on attempts to locate and identify people murdered by the secret police under Stalin https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/1/28/georgias-mass-graves-the-forensic-experts-uncovering-victims-of-stalins-purge

psyanojim:
https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998

"A new global gender divide is emerging" - the political/ideological gap between young men and young women has been widening for the last 30 years, and widened rapidly in the last 10 years.

Why this has happened, and what the implications are, are pretty profound questions for democracy.

Jubal:

--- Quote from: psyanojim on January 28, 2024, 11:45:29 PM ---https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998

"A new global gender divide is emerging" - the political/ideological gap between young men and young women has been widening for the last 30 years, and widened rapidly in the last 10 years.

Why this has happened, and what the implications are, are pretty profound questions for democracy.

--- End quote ---
That is really interesting: broadly speaking, I think the article's assessment of why this has happened rings fairly true. It doesn't surprise me per se that women of a younger generation are sharply to the left in a lot of countries: there's a clear sense of the right wing associating itself with curtailing fairly basic freedoms, and the things the right wing try and sell to women are often framed in quite anti-LGBT, "family values" ways which just don't land with a generation much of which a) has been brought up with a world that feels like it's lurching toward the apocalypse and don't feel like they can afford kids anyway and b) identifies as much more LGBT than their predecessors. Their offer to young men is a much more grimly effective one.

That said, much of that was true for people somewhat older than me, and the shift among people younger than me is clearly stark. I suspect there's also a big personalised content issue here: this is the TikTok generation, and algorithmic content really sharply focuses things into people's media bubbles. I don't know how one gets round that, really.

It's also worth noting that younger men are not wildly right wing on average, but I'd like to see the distribution for each gender not just the average: I would be unsurprised if young men actually had a double-peaked distribution, and that rather than younger men being more centrist which is what you might take from the graphs, some young men are far right and some young men are solidly on the left. The difference between those two possibilities is a very important one I suspect.


In election news, the far right got shut out of the second round of the Finnish presidential election: they came second in last year's parliament election but they've slumped backwards a few points since then and the presidency really requires cross-party support which they had approximately zilch of.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page