Electoral Democracy in 2024 (With Special Reference to Senegal and Ghana)
Two West African elections offer a look at democracy's serious limitations when it comes to channeling citizens' frustrations.
2024 was a “year of elections” - through the alignment of various cycles, this year happened to be particularly full of electoral contests. So 2024 gives a snapshot, of sorts, of where things stand with electoral democracy.
How did the “year of elections” turn out? One impetus for this post was a collection of six brief commentaries in the Journal of Democracy that offered, on the whole, a fairly optimistic take on how this year went. For Lucan Way, “As bad as things are, India’s political system remains more democratic than authoritarian.” For Rachel Riedl, “The 2024 election in Senegal - a country where democracy won despite unpromising conditions - should renew our confidence that the model of citizens mobilizing for democratic rights and effective governance can succeed.” For Dan Slater, “France’s people…rallied to resuscitate the Republic.” For Peter Lewis, South Africa’s “election has fortified South Africa’s democratic resilience…[and offered] a further rebuke of the capture and personalization of government as well as deteriorating governance.” Lewis is also heartened that “illiberal populists did not surge,” a reference to the left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters (few of the authors in the collection seem very enthusiastic about the Left or the Right, for context). On the less optimistic side, William Dobson is quite grim on Venezuela. Finally, Sheri Berman (one of my favorite political scientists writing today) says part of what my own impression of this year has been: “When mainstream parties fail to take citizens’ concerns seriously, the appeal of antiestablishment and even extremist parties will grow, and democracy may become endangered.” I would go even further, actually - even seemingly anti-systemic parties end up more conventional than they might first appear, and their setbacks, too, can lead citizens to lose faith and interest in democracy.
To me, the story about democracy’s trajectory in Africa and worldwide is five-fold. First, in terms of procedural and electoral integrity, we have a very mixed picture. Second, in terms of elections as a vehicle for change, incumbents and incumbent parties still hold tremendous advantages. Third, the viable candidates, including challengers, often come from a very narrow pool of familiar faces, and breaking into that group often takes either substantial personal wealth, years of playing insider politics, substantial street-level contestation, or blatant incumbent/insider failures. Fourth, even challengers who defeat incumbents often find themselves boxed in, struggling to deliver on promises for meaningful and structural change (which, perhaps, some of those “change candidates” never intended to fulfill - who knows?). Finally, democratically elected leaders have various ways of subverting and undermining the expressed will of the electorate. All of this adds up to a situation in which citizens’ influence over policymaking remains remote and, often, practically nil. The resulting frustrations create huge and sometimes revolutionary pressures, but then revolutionary or quasi-revolutionary upheavals often eventually end up in muddled or even counterrevolutionary outcomes that leave core citizen aspirations unaddressed.
Let’s look at the patterns in Africa and then look more closely at Senegal and Ghana.
Africa’s Elections in 2024
Within Africa this year (and I would hazard this schema broadly applies elsewhere), I see five different categories of elections:
Elections that did not occur: 2024 was meant to mark the end of military-led transitions in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Guinea, but in all three cases the juntas are making clear that transition timetables are firmly under their control and are, at this point, effectively open-ended.
Elections with strong incumbent dominance: An uneven political playing field, in some cases combined with institutional interference and coercion against the opposition, strongly favored incumbents in Algeria (84% for Abdelmadjid Tebboune), Chad (61% for Mahamat Deby), Comoros (57% for Azali Assoumani), Mauritania (56% for Mohamed Ould Ghazouani), Mozambique (71% for Daniel Chapo), Rwanda (99% for Paul Kagame), and Tunisia (91% for Kais Saied).
Elections with ruling party wins amid erosion: One of the most closely watched elections this year was in South Africa, where the longtime ruling party the African National Congress lost 71 seats and was forced, for the first time since Apartheid ended in 1994, into a coalition government. In addition to Prof. Lewis’ piece above, one analysis I found helpful is here.
Opposition victories by establishment politicians: This category would include Ghana (where former President John Mahama made a successful comeback), Mauritius (where Navinchandra Ramgoolam returned as prime minister having previously served from 1995-2000 and 2005-2014), and - if you count it - Somaliland (where former Speaker of the House of Representatives Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi won).
Opposition victories by long-time outsiders: Senegal and Botswana both saw major upsets by parties that had not previously been in power at the national level. You can read about Botswana’s elections here.
Of the few opposition victories, three of the five were by what I’m calling “establishment politicians” - that is, figures either mounting a comeback or coming from a very senior, insider position. These patterns also showed up globally this year, I would argue; Donald Trump, too, is by this point an establishment politician.
In terms of the trends I mentioned in the previous section, one can see, through some of the African and non-African examples, how narrow the pathways for structural change through voting are. In some cases, the incumbent is virtually guaranteed to win. In others, embattled or unpopular incumbents lose, but to someone the voters have already seen - and often, someone the voters have already previously both embraced and then rejected. What are the prospects for such figures to address ordinary citizens’ core problems?
In other cases, elections deliver a fractured mandate that can allow embattled incumbents to still control the government, whether in South Africa or France. In yet other cases, massive opposition victories are thinner than they first appear - much analysis of the United Kingdom’s parliamentary elections, for example, has convincingly argued that it was more a Tory loss than a deep-rooted Labour victory. This helps to explain why some opposition parties win stunning scores but then see their popularity collapse shortly after taking office, especially if their lack of ambition and vision becomes clear. Finally, in the outbreaks of post-election revolution that came this year, most prominently in Bangladesh, there will be a major test for whether popular mobilization translates into lasting change.
All of this brings us to Senegal and Ghana, the two major change elections in West Africa this year. In different ways, both countries’ elections underscore the limitations of democracy as a vehicle for change.
Senegal and Ghana
In Senegal in 2023, then-President Macky Sall, facing term limits, had declared that he would not seek a third term - ending serious ambiguity about his intentions. He soon tapped then-Prime Minister Amadou Ba as his successor, but in February 2024, Sall unilaterally postponed elections, in what scanned to me as a trial balloon for extending his time in office. Under massive street pressure, Sall soon backed down, allowing elections in March and also releasing, from prison, two longtime thorns in his side - opposition politicians Ousmane Sonko and Diomaye Faye. In the elections, the more famous Sonko was ineligible to run due to legal cases (that had played to Sall’s political benefit, for a time), but Faye ran on the duo’s behalf and won massively against Ba.
I certainly agree with Prof. Riedl and many other keen observers that this was a victory for Senegalese democracy. Certainly it is good that the electoral calendar was ultimately not subverted, and an opposition victory points to some serious dynamism in the Senegalese political system. But the amount of street pressure necessary to push back Sall’s disruptions points to some weakness in Senegalese democracy as well, and the pattern is also striking - both former President Abdoulaye Wade (in office 2000-2012) and Sall himself entered office promising change and riding waves of protest and pressure against embattled incumbents. Faye is much more of an outsider than Wade or Sall were, but it has been striking how quickly his party’s left-leaning, reformist agenda has been watered down, even following the smashing victory the party won in snap parliamentary elections in November. Faye and Sonko have also shown something of a tendency to lash out at critics, both from the opposition and the press, another concerning - and anti-democratic - trend. The basic question, then, of whether voters will get what they voted for, remains to be determined in Senegal as in France as in the UK as in Iran and beyond. This is what I like about Prof. Berman’s work, namely her attention to how mainstream parties chip away at democratic vibrancy by failing to deliver.
Turning to Ghana, the election there could be seen as a microcosm of electoral democracy in 2024 - a former president won decisively (56.5%) amid widespread citizen dissatisfaction with the incumbent party, especially over economic issues, and there was considerable election-related violence and unrest but not enough to derail the process altogether. Then - and this may sound familiar to Trump - the winner will come into office facing seriously high expectations for turning the economy around. Here is the BBC’s Thomas Naadi on Ghana:
Mahama has promised to make Ghana a "24-hour economy" through the creation of night-time jobs in both the public and private sectors. He said he would give businesses tax incentives to stay open at night and reduce electricity prices for them.
But his critics have doubts, pointing out that Ghana plunged into its worst electricity crisis during his first term and the power cuts were so bad that Mahama joked at the time that he was known as "Mr Dumsor" - "dum" means "off" and "sor" means "on" in the local Twi language.
He has pledged to abolish several taxes - including the much-criticised electronic levy on mobile transactions and the one on the carbon emissions produced by petrol or diesel-powered vehicles.
It’s striking how familiar, and tired, the ideas on offer are. In Senegal, Faye is leaning on new oil and gas projects as a vehicle for development and growth; in Ghana, Mahama is promising lean government and a roaring private sector juiced by tax cuts. It would be an understatement to say that such paths have been tried before. What kinds of change can voters then expect?
Democracy Is Looking Thin in 2024
At a procedural level, then, democracy fared decently in some places in 2024 while in many others, incumbents ran the table. At a deeper level, Senegal and Ghana’s trajectories suggest that even major upset elections can produce a new boss who ends up looking somewhat like the old boss or, in Ghana’s case, a return of the old boss to power with more or less the same old ideas. These patterns set up cycles (in Senegal, a sort of challenger-to-”detested soft authoritarian” pipeline) and also create rhythms where popular aspirations are mismatched with economic trajectories which are then both out of sync with electoral calendars and policymaking horizons. To me, the situation seems like more and deeper democracy, but that would require various political and economic gatekeepers letting ordinary people and various counter-elites have more of a say.
As West Africa’s recent history shows, meanwhile, unsavory alternatives to democracy are appealing to many people as well, especially when ordinary people are confronted with deeply flawed democratic and pseudo-democratic systems. To the extent that coup-makers in Mali and elsewhere have found popular support, it is in significant measure as a reaction against civilian presidents’ failures and disappointments.
The course many democracies and partial democracies are following, however, is not necessarily either the drama of coups and “democratic backsliding” or the path of vibrancy but rather a kind of muddling through, on display in France (and Germany) and, in the West African context, Nigeria. Few of these lackluster trajectories are going to end, at least any time soon, in a coup or a revolution. Far from it. The “year of elections” suggests that for many countries, a sort of staleness and periodic political crisis is the norm, all resulting in deep voter dissatisfaction with the system and its occupants, but with little prospects for fundamentally altering the parameters of politics.