2024: The Year of the Challenger?

As the dust settled on Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election in November last year, political analysts pronounced a global anti-incumbent wave. In 2024, approximately half of the worldwide population went to the polls. The result was staggering: 80% of incumbent governments in democracies saw a reduction in their vote share or seats compared with the previous election cycle (Burton 2024).

Historically, being an incumbent offers significant advantages. Candidates already in office typically benefit from greater name recognition, access to campaign resources, control over legislative agendas, and established political networks, all of which enhance their chances of re-election. A 2007 study found that incumbents in elections to the US House of Representatives had a 40-45% greater chance of success (Lee 2007), while a 2025 study of French local and parliamentary elections put this figure at 25.1% (Dano et al. 2025).

And yet in 2024, long-standing incumbents were replaced. In Botswana, the Botswana Democratic Party was voted out after 58 years in office. In the UK, the Conservative Party was voted out after 14 years in office. Other incumbents were weakened. In Japan, the ruling coalition lost its parliamentary majority in its worst showing since 2009. In India, the Bharatiya Janata Party lost the parliamentary majority it had held since 2014. In South Africa, the African National Congress entered into a coalition government, marking the first time it had not won an outright majority since the end of apartheid.

But what caused this anti-incumbent wave? And is it actually global? 

One factor played an outsized role – economic gloom, particularly concerning inflation. A mid-2024 Pew survey across 34 countries found that a median of 64% of respondents were concerned about their economy, with this figure jumping to over 70% in France, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, and the UK, all of which held elections in 2024 (Clancy and Lippert 2024). Most countries are one electoral cycle removed from the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted global supply chains and contributed to a surge in inflation, and its lingering effects have been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine.

Concerns over inflation were symptomatic of a wider distrust of government. Another mid-2024 Pew survey found that across 31 countries, a median of 54% of respondents were displeased with the functioning of democracy in their country, a figure which has increased since 2021 across most consistently surveyed nations (Wike and Fetterolf 2024). Indeed, those who expressed concern about their economy were more likely to also be displeased with their democracy.

Some challengers gained popularity through promises of stricter immigration policies. This contributed – along with factors discussed earlier – to Europe’s rightward shift in the European Parliament elections last June.

A long-term development that intensifies the anti-incumbent trend is growing internet and social media access. This often results in lower confidence in government institutions and intensifies political divisions by creating echo chambers around users (Woods 2025). It also gives minor parties a better chance of competing with mainstream ones by quickly and cheaply reaching a wider audience.

However, the anti-incumbent wave is not necessarily a ‘global’ one. In a column for the Financial Times, Ruchir Sharma states that incumbents in developing nations lost around 25% of the elections in 2024, compared to 85% in developed ones, in a reversal of trends observed in the early 2000s (Sharma 2025).

There are several possible explanations for this. Some developing and emerging economies – particularly in Asia – managed to maintain relatively mild post-pandemic inflation (Conner 2024), avoiding a key source of voter frustration. Another possible explanation is the greater popularity of leaders in these countries. India’s Narendra Modi and Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum – both representing parties that were re-elected in 2024 – had the highest leader approval ratings in 24 countries surveyed in Morning Consult’s January 2025 poll, with ratings of 75% and 66%, respectively (McMann and Frisbie 2025). However, few similarities exist between both leaders, and a lack of worldwide indicators of leader popularity by country beyond such surveys makes establishing a trend here difficult. A third potential explanation is that immigration is generally a less central issue in elections in developing nations, which are more likely to be points of departure as opposed to destinations (Sharma 2025).

So, will anti-incumbent sentiment continue in 2025? Possibly, but on a smaller scale, as fewer countries and a smaller percentage of the global population are going to the polls this year. Germany’s incumbent centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) has already suffered a major defeat, dropping to third place in Germany’s federal election in February 2025, although the victorious conservative CDU/CSU bloc will probably form a coalition with the SPD to govern.

Elsewhere, the key issues highlighted remain highly relevant. Yet in the past few weeks, polls in Canada and Norway indicate that incumbents previously predicted to lose in this year's elections have significantly narrowed these gaps or are in the lead, although it is unclear whether these trends will hold. This may be a sign of the volatility of the times, particularly in Canada’s case, as the Trump administration's foreign policy moves continue to have global repercussions. Alternatively, it could suggest that while the ‘incumbent advantage’ is unlikely to return soon, the ‘disadvantage’ of incumbency is gradually fading.

Sources

Burton, Cooper. “Democrats Aren’t Alone — Incumbent Parties Have Lost Elections All Around the World.” ABC News, November 18, 2024. https://abcnews.go.com/538/democrats-incumbent-parties-lost-elections-world/story?id=115972068. 

Clancy, Laura, and Jordan Lippert. “Economic Ratings Across 34 Countries Are More Negative Than Positive.” Pew Research Center, June 7, 2024. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/06/07/economic-ratings-across-34-countries-are-more-negative-than-positive/. 

Conner, Alexander. “The COVID-19 Inflation Episode: Lessons from Emerging Asia, Europe, and Latin America.” Brookings, April 30, 2024. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-covid-19-inflation-episode-lessons-from-emerging-asia-europe-and-latin-america/. 

Dano, Kevin, Francesco Ferlenga, Vincenzo Galasso, Caroline Le Pennec, and Vincent Pons. “Coordination and Incumbency Advantage in Multi-Party Systems - Evidence from French Elections.” Journal of the European Economic Association, January 15, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvaf001. 

Lee, David S. “Randomized Experiments from Non-Random Selection in U.S. House Elections.” Journal of Econometrics 142, no. 2 (May 2007): 675–97. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeconom.2007.05.004. 

Sharma, Ruchir. “Where Voters Don’t Want to Throw the Incumbents Out — and Why.” Financial Times, January 13, 2025. https://www.ft.com/content/75ece192-7313-4d0c-879a-3b551f4a5d15. 

McMann, Jason, and Sonnet Frisbie. “Global Leader Approval Rating Tracker.” Morning Consult, January 27, 2025. https://pro.morningconsult.com/trackers/global-leader-approval. 

Wike, Richard, and Janell Fetterolf. “Satisfaction with Democracy Has Declined in Recent Years in High-Income Nations.” Pew Research Center, June 18, 2024. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/06/18/satisfaction-with-democracy-has-declined-in-recent-years-in-high-income-nations/.

Woods, Ngaire. “In 2024, A Global Anti-Incumbent Election Wave.” Australian Strategic Policy Institute, January 6, 2025. https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/in-2024-a-global-anti-incumbent-election-wave/. 

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