‘The Ultimate Voting Year’: 2024 Will See Half The World’s Population Taking To The Polls
2024 has been dubbed the Ultimate Voting Year, with a historical number of people being eligible to vote this year-around half of the global population will be taking to the polls.
This year, EU citizens can elect Members of Parliament in the European Union elections- there is a population of 448 million EU citizens.
Some major national elections which will be held in 2024 include India (with a total population of 1.44 billion), the United States (341 million), and Russia (144 million).
Approximately 65 countries will be holding their national elections this year.
“2024 may be the make-or-break year for democracy in the world,” says Staffan Lindberg, the director of the Varieties of Democracy, or V-Dem, Institute, a Swedish think tank that analyses the “complexity of the concept of democracy.”
Lindberg’s worries do not lie with the fact that so many elections will be held in just one year, nor that many of these countries have an immense global influence, but rather that “so many have now empowered leaders or parties with antidemocratic learnings”.
In other words, 2024 is quite frankly, a make-or-break for democracy.
What do you make of this?
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