How many explanations have you heard in recent days for why Donald Trump resoundingly beat Kamala Harris in this week’s presidential election? Ten, Twenty, more? There has been no shortage of postmortems, virtually all focused on the United States of America and the specifics of the two candidates.
But as I always argue, leadership is a system with three parts, each of which is of equal importance: 1) leaders; 2) followers, and 3) contexts. I similarly always make clear that the word “contexts” is plural. So, if we want to analyze a certain leader-follower dynamic we need to set it not just in one context but in several simultaneously. Therefore, to understand what happened this week it’s essential to consider not just the context that is the United States of America but the context that is larger, the global one. It puts what happened here, in the U.S., in perspective.
Put simply, the losing ignominiously Democrats are in good company. They include Britain’s Rishi Sunak’s Tories; France’s Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble coalition; Japan’s Shigeru Ishiba’s Liberal Democrats, and even India’s Narendra Modi’s once dominant party, the BJP. Moreover, just this week the governing coalition of Germany’s Olaf Scholz collapsed, virtually guaranteeing that federal elections instead of taking place as originally scheduled, late next year, will be pushed forward, to early next year. Will Scholz remain chancellor thereafter? I suggest you don’t bet on it.
Nor is our neighbor to the north exempt from the general trend. The approval ratings of Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, are under 30 percent, so miserably low they make President Joe Biden’s look good!
To summarize the situation, the incumbents in every single one of the ten major countries that held national elections in 2024 were “given a kicking by voters”! Never in 124 years of tracking has this happened – until now.*
None of this makes the results of the American presidential election any less momentous. Donald Trump is no Kier Starmer (centrist leader of the Labour Party who replaced Sunak as prime minister). Still, the backlash against democratic incumbents worldwide, along with a swing to the right not just in the United States but in Europe, is illuminating. Just what it illuminates about leader and followers in democratic systems will be addressed in my next post.
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*The phrase and the figures are from John Burn-Murdoch, writing for the Financial Times.