Democracy — and the planet — are at stake in elections and governance around the world this year. A recent panel discussion explored the impact of elections in India, Amazonia, Mexico and the European Union.

Photo Credits. Left: May 29, 2024. Closing of the Claudia Sheinbaum campaign for president of Mexico. (Photo: Wotancito via WikiCommons, cropped; CC BY 4.0). Right: June 16, 2024. BJP campaign poster for 2024 Indian general election .(Photo:Mouryan via WikiCommons, altered; CC BY-SA 4.0.)

UCLA International Institute, October 16, 2024 — A panel discussion organized by the International Institute brought three UCLA faculty and a visiting German scholar together on October 8 to discuss elections and governance issues in India, Mexico, Amazonia and the European Union.

The event was part of the International Institute’s Democracy, Freedom, Truth Initiative and lecture series, a two-year multidisciplinary endeavor to investigate the three concepts and the ways in which they impact one another.

Marjorie Elaine, professor of education and associate vice provost of the institute, opened the meeting. The panel discussion, she said, was aimed at “[generating] conversations across regions and expertise by considering what we can learn from looking at some of the many significant elections that have happened or will soon happened around the world in 2024.”

David Kim, professor of European languages and transnational studies and associate vice provost of the institute, then introduced each of the speakers: Tejas Parasher, Susanna Hecht, Gaspar Rivera-Salgado and Ulrike Klinger.

Indian elections spark mass embrace of liberalism as justification for democracy

Although the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, won the largest number of seats in the April–June 2024 national parliamentary elections in India, giving BJP leader Narendra Modi a third consecutive term as prime minister, the BJP failed to meet its own projections for an overwhelming mandate, said Tejas Parasher.

An assistant professor of political science and faculty member in the global studies program at UCLA, Parasher observed that the Indian elections —the largest of the democratic exercises of 2024— marked a moment of evolution in the relationship between democracy, liberalism and rights.

“The expectation was not that the BJP would win … but actually do better than it had done five years earlier, when it had won a clear landslide victory,” said the political theorist. “The BFP only gained 240 seats, which is far less than that it had gained in 2019, and it only actually gained a majority through its coalition partners.”

The party was forced to form a coalition government with other parties in the National Democratic Alliance to achieve a majority in the parliament. Rather than see the election results as a watershed, Parasher said that they reflected several factors: the importance of regionalism in India politics, concerns over welfare provisions, India’s lagging economic growth, poor job numbers and constitutional erosion.

With respect to the latter, he said, “There was a real, tangible fear in the early months of 2024 that if the BJP were to win through a supermajority vote, it would have unimpeded power to amend — fundamentally amend — the Constitution.” In particular, people feared a return to the “emergency period” of 1975–77, when martial law was imposed, democracy and the parliament were suspended and the executive had unconstrained power.

That fear led to a campaign against the BJP that put “saving the constitution” at the forefront. Rather than a debate over competing visions of nationalism, said Parasher, “[T]he election came to be framed as an election for liberal rights, for a liberal vision of a division of powers… the sanctity of the judiciary and so on, but also for the protection of basic civil liberties and individual rights.

“I found this kind of mass uptake of a constitutional language of liberal rights to be very new… It seems new to me as a dynamic in India politics.

“I think something really interesting is happening, both in the Indian case and … more broadly: the growth of a kind of grassroots liberalism [in which] the perceived erosion of democracy is actually framed not in the language of democracy itself, but in the language of individual rights.”

“[W]hat this shows globally… is a very different argument for the electoral process, for the value of democracy… [T]he Indian elections are a kind of indicator of this debate about whether liberalism itself needs to be protected in a democratic framework.”

Elections in Amazonia impact the planet, not simply individual countries

“The stakes are really big in Amazonian governance. It’s not just … maybe we'll lose a pupfish or something, it’s like [we’ll lose] continent-level ecosystems,” said Susanna Hecht in a presentation that looked at the big-picture impacts of engaged and poor governance on the Amazon rainforest.

A professor of urban development at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and the UCLA Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Hecht also directs the Center for Brazilian Studies.

Amazonia is the name for the greater tropical forest of South America that is larger in size than the United States. It extends through Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, French Guyana, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela, together with thousands of Indigenous territories.

Although some of these countries may have sovereignty over only a small percentage of the whole, an individual government’s policies can significantly impact the overall health of the rainforest, said Hecht. Authoritarian and failed states in the region impede governance that would preserve and protect it.

Elections and political developments in Brazil approximate an almost a perfect [unplanned] social science experiment with respect to the Amazon, explained Hecht. Legal enforcement of laws to protect the rainforest were strengthened and enforced , then virtually removed and then strengthened again over the past two decades. Although the rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has declined following both elections of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the Brazilian presidency (in 2003 and 2023), she pointed out that the rate of deforestation overall is growing throughout Amazonia.

Accelerating destabilization of the rainforest means we are approaching two major planetary tipping points, warned the geographer. One would transform Amazonia from a place of carbon capture to one of mass carbon emission, in large part due to mass clearing and burning of the forest for crop production; the rapid disappearance of vital wetlands; and illegal mining, timber cutting and other activities by criminal organizations that are running large clandestine economies.

“We’re really coming close to that tipping point, which is … why it’s important to think about what political actors and actions and capacities and governance mean in terms of larger questions that are related to our lives.”

The other tipping point would destroy the function of the Amazon rain forest as a hydrological system, or biotic pump — both via actual rivers and aerial rivers — that is responsible for watering some of the important agricultural areas of the planet and sustaining key shipping routes at the same time.

“Environmental defenders [in the region] are subject to a great deal of violence, but they are also persisting in defending natural resources, defending human rights, defending environmental rights and ecological rights,” she said.

“[I]n the Andean areas, there are huge amounts of violence having to do with electoral politics … But this violence is also stimulating different and new forms of solidarity. … I always feel about Amazonia … [that] you’re always surprised. You never quite know how it’s going to come out.”

Mexican elections: Massive win by new party and first female president

The overwhelming victory of presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum (roughly 61% of the vote) and her MORENA (Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional, or National Regeneration Movement) Party in Mexico’s June 2014 elections led the first woman president in modern Mexican history to be sworn into office on October 1, said Gaspar-Rivera Salgado.

Her trajectory from a student activist in the 1990s to becoming mayor of Mexico City and then president with a supermajority in parliament is evidence of Sheinbaum’s long history in politics, noted the director of the Center for Mexican Studies and project director at the UCLA Labor Center.

“You see the leadership of MORENA that was selected two weeks ago is under 40. Actually, Luisa Marie Alcalde, the new president of MORENA, is 38 years old. So it’s like a whole different generation, and that gives me hope.”

Most Americans are unaware, said Rivera-Salgado, that presidents in Mexico are elected to a single, six-year term and barred from running again. Sheinbaum’s main campaign message was continuing the populist policies of Andres Manuel Obradór, despite his reputation abroad as a “reckless leftist.” Yet Manuel Obradór left office with a 70% approval rating, said the speaker, despite such recent controversial reforms as the constitutional amendment requiring all judges in the country, including Supreme Court justices, to be elected.

“This is a history, I think, of political transitions. I would argue that there had been a big political transition in Mexico, especially along the lines of the political actors, which are political parties,” said the labor scholar. “This is a story also of a new party emerging and becoming dominant in a very short period of time.” MORENA, he noted, was founded in 2014 and ran in its first presidential election only in 2018.

“Despite the fact there were seven national parties, these parties clustered alongside three main candidates, so they had to form coalitions,” he said. In the case of MORENA, that coalition included the Green Party and the Workers’ Party.

Sheinbaum’s major competitor in the presidential election was another woman: Xótchitl Gálvez of PAN (Partido Acción Nacional, or National Action Party), so the election of a woman was guaranteed, said Rivera-Salgado. Their dual candidacies grew out of electoral reforms in Mexico that now require the candidate slates of all parties to be 50% women and 50% men.

“[This change] has transformed elections in Mexico,” he continued. “Half the House of Representatives and half of the Senate [in Mexico] are now women.”

The overwhelming win by MORENA, however, raises fears among Mexicans about whether MORENA could replace the PRI (Partido Nacional Revolucionario, or the Institutional Revolutionary Party) as an electoral powerhouse that will dominate Mexican politics for decades, said Rivera-Salgado.

With Sheinbaum in office, he predicted a chance for multilateral solutions to issues in the U.S.-Mexico relationship if Kamala Harris is elected U.S. president in the November 2024 elections, especially those of narco trafficking, immigration and the approaching renegotiation/renewal of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on free trade.

European Parliamentary elections marked by gains by far-right parties, negative campaigning 

Ulrike Klinger, scholar-in-residence at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles and professor and chair, digital democracy at the European New School of Digital Studies, European University Viadrina, Germany, spoke about the June 2024 elections to the European Parliament.

National elections in the 27 member states of the European Union, which occur at different times in countries with “vastly different political systems, different media systems, different political cultures” are difficult to compare, said Klinger. Elections to the European Parliament, on the other hand, happen all at the same time among a total population of 450 million people, of which 375 are eligible to vote.

The digital studies scholar identified several notable issues associated with the 2024 elections. First, far-right parties made big gains in representation in the European Parliament, winning 25% of total seats. Second, the elections were accompanied by impressive volumes of negative campaigning, mostly on social media. And third, new parties and political movements have recently successfully established themselves relatively quickly in a number of European countries — a marked change from 10 or 20 years ago, when most new parties that were launched failed to survive.

The European parliamentary election in individual countries saw far-right parties come in first in France, with 30% of the vote for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party; and second in Germany, with roughly [16%] of the vote for AFD [Alternativ für Deutschland, or Alternative for Europe].

“We now have three [principal] groupings that are all far right, but they’re not united in one parliamentary group,” noted Klinger. “They’re not necessarily friends with each other and one reason for that, especially for the isolation of Germany’s AFD, is that their leading candidate, Maximilian Krah, is a really scandalous figure.”

Klinger noted that she and a team of colleagues were still analyzing 2024 data, but said that data from the EU elections of 2014 and 2019 showed a rise of negativity in European Parliamentary campaigns. Conservative parties increasingly adopted negative campaigning during in 2019 “because they benefit[ed] on social media for this. They [got] so much more engagement, “ she said.

Conceding that it was hard to compare the U.S. presidential election with the European parliamentary election, the German scholar observed, “I think one thing we definitely have in common is the vulnerability of our elections… when it comes to disinformation campaigns, the role of AI and the potential of seeing more and more deep fakes made with AI.

“So the question in the U.S. and Europe is: How can we safeguard our campaigns but still maintain freedom of speech? We see that U.S. voters are worried about AI and the upcoming elections,” she concluded. At least in Europe, she noted, the EU Digital Services Act (adopted in 2022 and fully in force as of 2024) gives scholars legal rights to certain data from social media platforms that will enable better analysis of the impacts of negative campaigning and the use of AI.