Taiwan will open the election year, followed by Iran and Portugal. Voting is also taking place in India and the United Kingdom
Rome, 30 December. 2024 will be the year with the most elections ever. Seventy-six countries, representing approximately 60% of global GDP and with a total population of over 2 billion people, will take their citizens to the polls.
And even if some of these elections are rather obvious, such as the expected new victory of Vladimir Putin in the first round of the Russian presidential elections next March, others, however, promise to be uncertain and therefore even more decisive: starting from next 13 January, when China and the United States will be interested spectators of the Taiwanese presidential elections, where a victory for the “pro-Beijing” camp could dramatically change the scenario on the Strait. There is also anticipation for the outcome of the European elections which will take place in June: around 400 million voters in the 27 member states are called to the polls to elect the new European Parliament. 2024, then, will end ‘with a bang’: on November 6th we will vote in the United States for what today promises to be a new face-to-face meeting between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
The first stage of the “most electoral year ever” – in fact there will also be voting in Iran, Portugal, India and the United Kingdom to name just the most awaited elections – will be Taiwan, the island that China (but also the West) does not recognizes as independent but holds democratic elections every 4 years to elect its presidency. On January 13, the “green camp” of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) will try to further prolong a political dominance that has persisted since 2016, the year in which the current outgoing president Tsai Ing-wen shook the balance in the Strait by defeating the “blue camp” ” pro-Beijing Nationalist Party (KMT). The new face-to-face promises to be more balanced than the previous ones: although over 60% of the population continues to define themselves as “Taiwanese” compared to only 3% as “Chinese”, the economic slowdowns of the last years of Tsai’s government have favored a return of Kmt, whose program is perceived by many, especially the so-called “white collar workers”, as more rational and sustainable on an economic level.
For the DPP, the presidential candidate is called Lai Ching-te, already Tsai’s deputy since 2020 and disliked in Beijing for his even more rigid positions compared to the outgoing presidency. The Nationalists respond with Hou You-Ih, who rose to prominence as mayor of New Taipei, and who presented the vote of the 13th as a “choice between war and peace”. However, the possibilities of a changing of the guard at the presidency of the “Republic of China” saw a sharp slowdown in mid-November, when the KMT was unable to reach an agreement with the centrists of the “Taiwan People’s Party” (TPP) to a joint candidacy in an anti-DPP key. Despite the undoubted “cheering” from Beijing, the “blue camp” still starts quite behind the green camp in the polls, which enjoys great support from almost all young Taiwanese people and has excellent relations with the United States .
This article is originally published on padovanews.it
