2024: An election year

This is a very important year. The Year of the Dragon will see hotly-contested elections in major countries and the polls shall impact on the global economy and overall socioeconomic conditions. The Philippines will prepare for the 2025 local polls too and for the big fight for the next presidential election in 2028. Thus, most decisions will be political or diluted with political color.

The 2024 US presidential elections will be the sixtieth in its long history. Based on the US Constitution, American voters vote for a president and a vice president but their votes can be overruled by the Electoral College. In many instances, the winner of the popular vote can lose in the Electoral College. Example was that of Hillary Clinton who got 2.9 million more votes than Trump but the latter got more electoral college votes or 304 compared to Clinton's 227. According to vote tallies from the Associated Press, Clinton amassed 65,844,610 votes across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, 48.2% of all votes cast. Trump received 62,979,636 votes, 46.1% of all votes cast.

This year's US elections will be held on Tuesday, November 5. And it looks like it will be a return bout between two old men: Democrat Joe Biden and the one he defeated in 2020, Donald Trump. If Trump gets the Republican nomination and wins the presidency again this year, he will duplicate the feat of Grover Cleveland. If both Trump and Biden shall get their respective parties' nomination, it will be a repeat of what happened in 1956. As usual, the outcome of the elections will be determined by large states and their voting patterns. For instance, the District of Columbia, the seat of the federal government, has always voted Democrat in all the last 13 elections from 1972 to 2020. California, Connecticut, and Delaware voted Democrat from 1992 to 2020. The fight between Trump and Biden will be a very close one. The winner will achieve victory not due to his strength but because of the many issues against the opponent.

India Prime Minister Modi of the BJP party is expected to win a third term because of recent developments in political realignments. In Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, and Mizoram, pollsters had low expectations for the national governing BJP party because these have never historically been strongly pro-BJP states. How things have changed. The BJP scored a hat-trick of wins across Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh, and increased their number of seats in Telangana and Mizoram. We believe these results make the likelihood of Modi’s third term highly probable --some pundits have even begun to talk of Modi’s fourth term, in 2029. As a strongly pro-growth government, we believe this bodes well for continued reform and development over the medium term; the reforms of this latest term have been a fundamental factor behind India’s recent strong performance.

The 2024 presidential election is the fifth general election in Indonesia. The winner shall hold office until 2029. The polls shall be held on February 14, 2024 and incumbent Joko Widodo is term-limited and cannot run for a third term.

The three leading candidates are Annies Rasyid Baswedan, independent, born in 1969, former minister of Education and Culture under Widodo and former governor of Jakarta. Second is Prabowo Subianto Djojohadikusumo, a right-wing former military officer currently serving as minister of Defense, and a former husband of former president Suharto's second daughter. He was dishonorably discharged from the military and banned from the US for alleged human rights violations.

The third Indonesian presidential candidate is Ganjar Pranovo, a former student activist and loyalist of Megawati Soekarnoputri from the days of the internal struggle for the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI), he was nominated by the PDI chairwoman to run for president and was registered as a candidate of the 2024 election. There are 204,807,222 registered voters, which is 6.9% less than the number of voters four years ago.

With the elections in Mexico and the EU Parliament, this year will be very political with heavy economic repercussions. Let us all hope for better times as new politicians may enter into the global arena of politics and the economy. The Philippines is always political, Filipinos eat politics for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and many snacks in between. It is predicted that the BBM-Duterte Uniteam shall finally break up, after the many cracks in 2023. Well, that may be good news for all of us, by the way.