In global elections, incumbents are in trouble | Ian Bremmer | Quick Take
Lots going on especially big elections. We have the France results. We have the UK results. We have the Iran results. We have a lot of uncertainty of course, here in the United States. My big takeaway is this is a horrible time to be an incumbent.
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Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take to kick off your week. Lots going on especially big elections. We have the France results. We have the UK results. We have the Iran results. We have a lot of uncertainty of course, here in the United States. My big takeaway is this is a horrible time to be an incumbent.
It's really challenging and what a huge reason for it that people aren't talking about, because it's already way in the rearview mirror is the pandemic. If I'm talking to you right now, your life was really changed by the pandemic in ways that you never would have expected before, right? I mean, we all had to deal with social distancing and masking and vaccine and not only that, but of course, the global economy seized up and people also stopped moving around for like a couple of years. An enormous amount, trillions and trillions of dollars were spent and that got us through an incredibly difficult time. But on the back of that, you suddenly have no more money that's being thrown at everyone, and you've got inflation that comes from, all of a sudden, the supply chains moving and demand moving. You know that these are costs that people are paying, that people no longer have those checks that were coming in during the pandemic, and those savings have been deployed already if you're working or even middle class. And people are moving again, people are moving not just from city to city, but also around the world. So migration is really picking up. And you really don't want to be the leader who's holding the bag when that happens. That's absolutely a big piece of what happened in France. It's a big piece of what happened in the United Kingdom, South Africa, India.
Lots of these elections are people that are unhappy with their existing leadership because it is such an unprecedented environment, and they're having a hard time dealing with that. There are other issues, too, don't get me wrong. And certainly in the UK, the fact that this also comes on the back of Brexit and a level of perceived incompetence on the part of successive conservative prime ministers who were not elected by the population but were selected by the party. The Labor Party did just as well in 2024 as they did in 2019. I think they picked from 33% to 34% total population. It was hardly a landslide, but the Conservative Party imploded because people were unhappy with them. And that is very much the story. It's that the existing incumbents are not doing well.
Macron is not doing well. He's lost so many seats in France and the far right has doubled their number in the parliament and the far left and the left coalition that is not Macron's centrist have also done far better, far better than anyone expected.In fact, they came in number one. Percentage wise, it's Macron in the center that is falling apart in France. That's the big lesson. It's not that the far right is doing well or badly. Some of the far left is doing well or badly. It’s that the incumbent, whoever they are, are really getting hit. Now that leads to a big question here in the United States.
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