It has been widely observed that 2024 is packed full of elections. Seven of the world’s 10 most populous nations – Bangladesh, India, the United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia, Mexico – are going or have already gone to the polls. In total, almost half of the world population will hold elections.
A democratic deficit or democracy’s triumph? Perhaps it’s worth noting that quantity is not the same as quality. For example, the re-election of Vladimir Putin next month in Russia seems like a foregone conclusion.
Also, what has been less remarked on is that in quite a few national elections, the family names and backgrounds of successful candidates or party leaders can explain a lot about their victories, rather than their domestic politics or personal merits.
What’s in a name? It seems in democracy as often in autocracy, having the right surname or family background means a lot, if not everything.
Prabowo Subianto, the ex-general and special forces commander, is set to become the next president of Indonesia. The man who has been implicated in some of the worst atrocities committed in his country’s recent history has successfully sold himself as a cuddly and cute grandaddy to a new generation of young voters, though not without some allegations of voter intimidation.
To understand his military-political career, there are two salient points: he married a daughter of the late Indonesian strongman Suharto, and he hails from a powerful banking family that holds tens of thousands of hectares of land for plantation, mining and industry.
It was ironic that for many years, he was barred from entering Australia and the United States because of allegations of human rights violations against him. These relate to the Indonesian army’s role in the occupation and repression in East Timor, now Timor-Leste, and in the riots in the dying days of the Suharto regime during the Asian financial crisis, among other human rights cases.
And yet, he reportedly referred to himself as “the Americans’ fair-haired boy”. After all, he received training, as did many third world dictators and death squad leaders, in the US during the Cold War. As a young rising star in the Indonesian military, he trained at Georgia’s Fort Benning and North Carolina’s Fort Bragg, now known as Fort Moore and Fort Liberty, respectively. And Washington tolerated, if not tacitly supported, Suharto’s brutal occupation of East Timor, just as it did with the anti-communist purge – which cost the lives of 400,000 to a million Indonesian civilians, many of them ethnic Chinese – that was launched by Suharto as he seized power in the mid-1960s.
But that’s all water under the bridge. Retiring President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, who came to power thinking he would bring to justice people like Prabowo, ended up throwing his entire government apparatus to support Prabowo’s election bid. But that came after Jokowi and his brother-in-law, the chief justice, helped lower the age requirement in electoral law so the president’s eldest son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, could be Prabowo’s running mate in the election.
The pairing mirrored the 2022 election of President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr and Vice-President Sara Duterte. Sara is a daughter of Rodrigo Duterte who is Marcos Jnr’s predecessor, and Ferdinand is the son of the late Marcos Snr, one of the most brutal and corrupt dictators propped up by Washington during the Cold War. The Marcos and the Dutertes are now having a fallout, which could well destabilise Philippine politics at a pivotal moment in Southeast Asian geopolitics.
We will see how long the alliance between Prabowo and his vice-president’s family will last.
Meanwhile, it looks like more political drama in Pakistan with powerful but formerly enemy clans joining hands in a marriage of convenience. The problem is that in the latest election, candidates from the party of ousted and jailed prime minister Imran Khan did surprisingly well running as independents, but not enough to secure a clean majority.
Worry not. The country’s two political dynasties, the Sharif and Bhutto clans, who respectively run the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), will form a government instead. In a power-sharing deal, Shehbaz Sharif will be prime minister while Asif Ali Zardari will be president. The latter is the father of Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the PPP chairman.
Washington will be pleased. In pro-Imran Khan circles, many believe the Americans wanted him out. He is now serving a total of 31 years in jail from numerous corruption sentences. That’s a bit rich since he was probably no more corrupt than most of his political peers.
Last summer, The Intercept, a US online news magazine, leaked what purported to be a confidential conversation between Pakistan’s then ambassador to the US, Asad Majeed Khan, and Donald Lu, the US assistant secretary of state for the bureau of South and Central Asian affairs.
Lu reportedly said: “I think if a no-confidence vote against the prime minister [Khan] succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the prime minister. Otherwise, I think it will be tough going ahead.”
Imran Khan visited Moscow on February 24, 2022, just as Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, and Washington was furious.
A month after the alleged Asad Majeed Khan-Lu meeting, the parliament in Islamabad passed a no-confidence vote to remove Imran Khan from power. After that, an avalanche of corruption charges were laid against him.
In neighbouring Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina has won a fifth term as prime minister. No surprise there, as her authoritarianism and political crackdowns led the opposition to boycott the election last month, so her victory was a foregone conclusion.
How did she get into politics? Well, she was a daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father and first president of the country. She is now the world’s longest-serving female head of state, thanks partly to her autocratic style taken after her father. Her sister is a leader of her ruling Awami League.
But she also deserved much credit for allowing close to a million Rohingya refugees fleeing genocide in Myanmar to enter her country in 2017. Perhaps given the nature of politics in her country and the region, you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.
US President Joe Biden likes to think that today’s global struggle is between democracy and authoritarianism. But that’s too simple as to falsify the nature of politics itself. Some authoritarian states can be quite responsive and responsible to their citizens’ needs while some democratic governments would just ignore them. Perhaps every democracy struggles with its innate authoritarian tendencies at some time or another throughout its history and will do so in the future.
And nowhere is it more difficult to resist authoritarianism in a democracy than when powerful clans or political dynasties dominate their countries. That to me is one of the most important lessons to be taken from quite a few elections these days.