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Half the World to Vote in 2024, With Global Ramifications

LONDON — 2024 will pose a major test of democratic rule as an estimated 4 billion people in more than 50 nations — almost half the world’s population — are set to vote in national elections, with the outcomes likely to shape global politics for years or decades to come.

Bangladesh began 2024 with the first major election of the year as Sheikh Hasina won a fourth consecutive term as prime minister Sunday. Opposition parties boycotted the vote over complaints that it was neither free nor fair.

A crucial presidential election is due to take place on the self-governing island of Taiwan on January 13. China’s threat to retake the island by force looms over the vote, with political parties divided on how to approach Beijing.

“We are not only choosing Taiwan’s future leaders to decide on the country’s future but also deciding on the peace and stability of the Indo-Pacific region,” William Lai, the presidential candidate for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, told supporters at a campaign rally earlier this month. Lai is ahead in the polls.

In February, Indonesia is set to choose a new president to rule the nation of 277 million people, making it one of the world’s biggest votes held on a single day.

Pakistan will hold parliamentary elections in February; opposition leader and former Prime Minister Imran Khan remains jailed on charges of leaking state secrets, which he denies.

Russians will vote in presidential elections in March — although observers predict incumbent Vladimir Putin is all but certain to win as he is able to control the electoral process and state media.

“Putin is not going to have any genuine opponents,” said Ian Bond of the Center for European Reform. “He has control of all the administrative machinery required to make sure that a crushing vote in favor of him is delivered and we get another six years of Putin up to at least 2030.”

Largest democracy

India — the world’s biggest democracy — will hold parliamentary elections in April and May, with the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, ahead in the polls.

Veteran Indian political journalist Pushp Saraf believes the opposition will struggle to make headway.

“It all depends how united they are,” Saraf said. “Otherwise, if they stay disunited, as they appear to be many times, they have little chance of succeeding against BJP, which is organizationally very strong, and with Narendra Modi, who is riding high on the popularity wave, at least in the Hindi heartland.”

“These are very significant elections because there are clearly two opinions in the country at the moment. One is that BJP is polarizing society along the communal lines. And on the other hand, there is the opinion that BJP is focusing more on national security,” Saraf told The Associated Press.

On June 2, Mexico is due to hold its presidential election, which could herald a new milestone for the country, “because of the possibility that, for the first time, a woman will govern Mexico,” according to Mexican pollster Patricio Morelos. Mexico’s ruling party has selected Claudia Sheinbaum, a former mayor of Mexico City, as its candidate.

The European Union, representing more than half-a-billion people, is set to hold parliamentary elections in June. Polls suggest a resurgence in support for right-wing populist parties in many countries, including France, Germany and Italy.

“There is a real possibility, I think, that the far right will do well in European elections. Not to the point of running the European Parliament, but conceivably to the point where anyone who wants to run the European Parliament has to take account of what they’re saying and doing,” Anand Menon, professor of international politics at Kings College London, told VOA.

Britain is scheduled to hold elections before the end of the year, with polls suggesting opposition Labour Party leader Keir Starmer is on course to end a tumultuous 14 years of Conservative rule, with five different prime ministers.

“We had the Brexit wars that dominated everything, then we had COVID-19, now we’ve got the cost-of-living crisis. We’ve had government instability… the instability itself has become a political issue,” Menon said.

On November 5, the United States is due to hold a highly anticipated presidential election as Americans decide whether to give Democrat Joe Biden a second term as U.S. president or choose a Republican alternative, with Donald Trump seemingly his most likely opponent — although the challenger faces numerous legal hurdles in the run up to the vote.

Worldwide effects

The impact of many of these elections in 2024 will likely be felt around the world, said analyst Menon.

“Yes, all politics is local — but there are global trends. Immigration is going to figure a lot in many elections around the world. It will figure in the U.S. election, it will figure in the European elections, it will figure in the U.K. election,” Memon said.

“Insecurity will be a major factor. One of the things we’re living with in the West now is an increased sense of insecurity, both economic — but also in security terms, given the war that’s going on in Ukraine and given the doubts about what the Taiwanese election later this month might mean for Taiwan-Chinese relations.

“So, there are common factors, but those are refracted through the prism of the local and domestic in each country, so they play out in different ways,” Menon said.
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Trump’s Vows to Deport Millions Are Undercut by His Record, History

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Trump Downplays Jan. 6 Capitol Siege, Calls Jailed Rioters ‘Hostages’

NEWTON, Iowa — Former President Donald Trump, campaigning in Iowa on Saturday, marked the third anniversary of the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by casting the migrant surge on the southern border as the “real” insurrection.

Just over a week before the Republican nomination process begins with Iowa’s kickoff caucuses, Trump did not explicitly acknowledge the date. But he continued to claim that countries have been emptying jails and mental institutions to fuel a record number of migrant crossings, even though there is no evidence that is the case.

“When you talk about insurrection, what they’re doing, that’s the real deal. That’s the real deal. Not patriotically and peacefully — peacefully and patriotically,” Trump said, quoting from his speech on January 6, before a violent mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol as part of a desperate bid to keep him in power after his 2020 election loss.

Trump’s remarks in Newton in central Iowa came a day after Biden delivered a speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where he cast Trump as a grave threat to democracy and called January 6 a day when “we nearly lost America — lost it all.”

With a likely rematch of the 2020 election looming, both Biden and Trump have frequently invoked January 6 on the campaign trail. Trump, who is under federal indictment for his efforts to overturn his 2020 loss to Biden, has consistently downplayed or spread conspiracy theories about a riot in which his supporters — spurred by his lies about election fraud — tried to disrupt the certification of Biden’s win.

Trump also continued to bemoan the treatment of those who have been jailed for participating in the riot, again labeling them “hostages.” More than 1,230 people have been charged with federal crimes connected to the violence, including assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy.

“They ought to release the J6 hostages. They’ve suffered enough,” he said in Clinton, in the state’s far east. “Release the J6 hostages, Joe. Release ’em, Joe. You can do it real easy, Joe,” he said.

Trump was holding the commit-to-caucus events just over a week before voting will begin on January 15. He arrived at his last event nearly three-and-a-half hours late due to what he said was a mechanical issue with a rented plane.

After Trump spoke in Newton, he signed hats and other items people in the crowd passed to him, including a copy of a Playboy magazine that featured him on the cover.

One man in the crowd, Dick Green, was standing about 15 feet away, weeping after the former president autographed his white “Trump Country” hat and shook his hand.

“It’ll never get sold. It will be in my family,” Green said of the hat.

A caucus captain and a pastor in Brighton, Iowa, Green said he had prayed for four years to meet Trump.

“I’ll never forget it,” he said. “It’s just the beginning of his next presidency.”

Trump spent much of the day assailing Biden, casting him as incompetent and the real threat to democracy. But he also attacked fellow Republicans, including the late Sen. John McCain of Arizona, whose “no” vote derailed GOP efforts to repeal former President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law.

“John McCain, for some reason, couldn’t get his arm up that day,” said Trump of McCain, who was shot down over Vietnam in 1967 and spent 5½ years as a prisoner of war. The injuries he suffered left him unable to lift his arms over his head for the rest of his life. His daughter, Meghan McCain, responded on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, calling Trump an expletive and her father an “American hero.”

Earlier Saturday, Trump courted young conservative activists in Des Moines, speaking to members of Run GenZ, an organization that encourages young conservatives to run for office.

Trump’s campaign is hoping to turn out thousands of supporters who have never caucused before as part of a show of force aimed at denying his rivals momentum and demonstrating his organizing prowess heading into the general election.

His chief rivals, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, were also campaigning in the state as they battle for second place in hopes of emerging as the most viable alternative to Trump, who is leading by wide margins in early state and national polls.

Trump has used the trip to step up his attacks against Haley, who has been gaining ground. He again cast her Saturday as insufficiently conservative and a “globalist” beholden to Wall Street donors, and accused her of being disloyal for running against him.

“Nikki will sell you out just like she sold me out,” he charged.

On Friday, Trump had highlighted several recent Haley statements that drew criticism, including her comment that voters in New Hampshire correct Iowa’s mistakes (“You don’t have to be corrected,” he said.) and her failure to mention slavery when asked what had caused the Civil War.

“I don’t know if it’s going to have an impact, but you know like … slavery’s sort of the obvious answer as opposed to her three paragraphs of bulls—,” he told a crowd Friday.

In Newton, he said that he was fascinated by the “horrible” war, which he suggested he could have prevented.

“It’s so fascinating,” he said. “It’s just different. I just find it… I’m so attracted to seeing it… So many mistakes were made. See that was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you.”

Haley’s campaign has pointed to his escalating attention, including a new attack ad, as evidence Trump is worried about her momentum.

“God bless President Trump, he’s been on a temper tantrum every day about me … and everything he’s saying is not true,” Haley told a crowd Saturday in North Liberty, Iowa.  
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Biden Targets Trump in Speech Defending Democracy as ‘Sacred Cause’

Focusing heavily on the threat he says former US President Donald Trump poses to American democracy, President Joe Biden kicked off his reelection campaign by pledging to make the defense of the country’s democratic system the central theme of his 2024 campaign and potential second term. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
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NY Seeks $370M in Penalties in Trump’s Civil Fraud Trial

NEW YORK — New York state lawyers increased their request for penalties to over $370 million Friday in Donald Trump’s civil business fraud trial. He retorted: “They should pay me.”

The exchange came as lawyers for both sides filed papers highlighting their takeaways from the trial in court filings ahead of closing arguments, set for next Thursday. Trump is expected to attend, though plans could change.

It will be the final chance for state and defense lawyers to make their cases. The civil lawsuit, which accuses the leading Republican presidential hopeful of deceiving banks and insurers by vastly inflating his net worth, is consequential for him even while he fights four criminal cases in various courts.

The New York civil case could end up barring him from doing business in the state where he built his real estate empire. On top of that, state Attorney General Letitia James is seeking the $370 million penalty, plus interest — up from a pretrial figure of $250 million, nudged to over $300 million during the proceedings.

The state says the new sum reflects windfalls from wrongdoing, chiefly $199 million in profits from property sales and $169 million in savings on interest rates, as calculated by an investment banking expert hired by James’ office.

Trump bristled at the proposed penalty in an all-caps post on his Truth Social platform, insisting anew that “there was no victim, no default, no damages.”

He complained that the attorney general was seeking $370 million and instead “should pay me,” asserting that businesses are fleeing New York.

According to the state Labor Department, the number of private sector jobs in New York increased 1% in the year that ended this past November, compared to 1.6% nationally.

James’ office argued in a filing Friday that Trump, his company and executives clearly intended to defraud people.

“The myriad deceptive schemes they employed to inflate asset values and conceal facts were so outrageous that they belie innocent explanation,” state lawyer Kevin Wallace wrote.

The state alleges Trump and his company ginned up exorbitant values for golf courses, hotels, and more, including Trump’s former home in his namesake tower in New York and his current home at the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. The numbers were listed on personal financial statements that netted him attractive rates on loans and insurance, leaving him money to invest in other projects and even his 2016 presidential campaign, James’ office says.

The defendants, including Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric, deny any wrongdoing. The former president has painted the case as a political maneuver by James, Judge Arthur Engoron and other Democrats, saying they’re abusing the legal system to try to cut off his chances of winning back the White House this year.

He asserts that his financial statements came in billions of dollars low, and that any overestimations — such as valuing his Trump Tower penthouse at nearly three times its actual size — were mere mistakes and made no difference in the overall picture of his fortune.

He also says the documents are essentially legally bulletproof because they said the numbers weren’t audited, among other caveats. Recipients understood them as simply starting points for their own analyses, the defense says.

None of Trump’s lenders testified that they wouldn’t have made the loans or would have charged more interest if his financial statements had shown different numbers, and 10-plus weeks of testimony produced “no factual evidence from any witness that the gains were ill-gotten,” attorneys Michael Madaio and Christopher Kise wrote in a filing Friday. Nor, they said, was there proof that insurers were ripped off.

Separately, defense lawyers argued that claims against Executive Vice Presidents Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. should be dismissed because they never had “anything more than a peripheral knowledge or involvement in the creation, preparation, or use of” their father’s financial statements.

The sons relied on the work of other Trump Organization executives and an outside accounting firm that prepared those documents, attorneys Clifford Robert and Michael Farina said, echoing the scions’ own testimony.

Their father also took the stand, disputing the allegations, decrying the case as political and criticizing the judge and the attorney general. James’ office argued in its filing Friday that Trump was “not a credible witness.”

“He was evasive, gave irrelevant speeches and was incapable of answering questions in a direct and credible manner,” Wallace wrote.

The verdict is up to the judge because James brought the case under a state law that doesn’t allow for a jury. Engoron has said he hopes to decide by the end of this month.

He will weigh claims of conspiracy, insurance fraud and falsifying business records. But he ruled before trial on the lawsuit’s top claim, finding that Trump and other defendants engaged in fraud for years. With that ruling, the judge ordered that a receiver take control of some of the ex-president’s properties, but an appeals court has frozen that order for now.

During the trial, Engoron fined Trump a total of $15,000 after finding that he violated a gag order that barred all trial participants from commenting publicly on the judge’s staff. The order was imposed after Trump maligned the judge’s principal law clerk.

Trump’s lawyers are appealing the gag order.
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Republican Party Consolidates Control of Deep South Statehouses

NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA — The January 8 inauguration of Jeff Landry as Louisiana governor consolidates Republican Party control of statehouses in America’s Deep South and the region’s shift to more conservative governance.

Nearly 60% of Louisiana voters chose Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

Republicans are ready for change at the statehouse in Baton Rouge.

As a candidate and as the state’s attorney general, Landry backed banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths, expanding rights for gun owners and enacting a near-total abortion ban without exceptions for rape and incest.

“I’m tired of the government doing everything for everybody, because it makes people lazy,” said retired firefighter Robert Caretto. “I believe in peace through military strength, I believe we shouldn’t make decisions that hurt children with gender changes based on what a small percentage of gay or trans people want, and I believe in strict borders that protect Americans.

“I want to leave this country better for my grandkids, so I want a government that shares my values,” he told VOA. “I’m excited because I think this incoming Louisiana government is a step in the right direction.”

New Orleans event coordinator and Democratic voter Tana Velen sees the new governor as a step backward.

“I’m so worried, especially as a woman, about the direction we’re heading,” she told VOA. “I’m afraid women will lose their lives and their ability to have children because of these decisions being made by politicians instead of doctors, I’m afraid the trans community will no longer have access to gender-affirming care, and I’m afraid his policies will cause Louisiana’s public schools to fall even further behind the rest of the country.”

Outgoing Governor John Bel Edwards “governed for the last eight years as a conservative on most issues even though he was a Democrat,” said Barry Erwin, CEO of the public policy group Council for a Better Louisiana. “When it came to abortion, the right to bear arms and even most fiscal issues, he often sided with Republicans.”

With a legislative supermajority, Erwin said, Republican lawmakers “were able to get most of what they wanted anyway. What they couldn’t do, they’ll be able to do now with Landry as governor. But after they get a few of those higher profile things done in the first year or two, I don’t think things will feel too different.”

Shifting Louisiana follows a shifting South

Shifting from a Democratic governor to a Republican governor is part of a decadeslong trend in states across the Deep South. Dillard University professor of Urban Studies and Public Policy Robert Collins said it is partly because past political nuances in the region are gone.

“In America today, politics are more nationalized,” he told VOA. “Democrats are liberal, and Republicans are conservative. You basically either support Trump or you don’t. And everyone basically fits into one of those two categories.

“But from before the Civil War in the 1860s until after the civil rights battles of the 1960s, you had more factions. Rival Democrats could be liberal or conservative, and the GOP was split into liberal and conservative camps, as well.”

There were very few Republicans in the pre-Civil War South because the party’s policies were considered anti-slavery. The economies of southern states, including Louisiana, depended largely on slavery, so voters in the state — who were all white because slaves didn’t have the right to vote — were largely conservative Democrats.

That was mostly unchanged until the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which struck down the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War and finally made it possible for Black Americans at large to vote.

“You would have expected Black voters to align with the Republican Party because they were the party seen to abolish slavery during the Civil War,” Collins said, “but there was no Republican Party in the South in the 1960s. If you wanted your vote to count for something, you had to vote Democrat. So Black southerners became Democrats along with the pro-racism whites — white people were conservative Democrats while Black people were liberal.”

Republicans focused on white, southern Democrats, many of whom were fearful that Black voters were becoming too powerful and were disenchanted with their party for helping pass civil rights laws.

“Republican leaders like Barry Goldwater and future President Richard Nixon saw this disenchantment and offered the Republican Party as an alternative via what is called the ‘Southern Strategy,’” Collins said. “It took decades, but slowly, the conservative Democrats of southern states like Louisiana became Republicans.”

National politics take over

Since Edwards first took office as governor in 2016, Democrats’ share of seats in the Louisiana House of Representatives fell from 41 to 32 out of 105. And within the Republican Party, moderates are losing to more conservative challengers, pushing Louisiana governance further to the right. 

“The other states in the Deep South had already transitioned away from the nuance of local politics,” Collins said, “and with the election of Jeff Landry as governor, it seems Louisiana has finally fully transitioned to the duality of national politics, as well.”

“How do I feel about the direction of our state?” asked Larisa Diephuis, a New Orleans Democrat. “Well, we’re leaving.”
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Biden to Sharpen Attack on Trump in Jan. 6 Anniversary Speech

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