2024 Will Be The Busiest Political Year On Record

Yesterday, Deutsche Bank's Jim Reid published his 2024 World Outlook titled “The race against time” (which we will discuss shortly), and which refers to the fact that funding has dried up or tightened considerably over the last couple of years for various parts of the economy as rates have risen. So can central banks loosen, and can yields fall quickly enough to avoid a funding accident that could lead to contagion? Those are some of the questions Reid and his team try to answer.

One interesting mention in the report is a point that BofA's Michael Hartnett has repeatedly made in his Flow Show notes, namely that 2024 will see elections in countries covering around half the world’s population.

In today's Chart of the Day by the DB strategist, he looks at this back over 220 years and shows that this is set to be the year with the biggest percentage of elections across the globe. Also interestingly, it will be the polar opposite of 2023 which was one of the lightest years in the last four decades. In fact, this time last year DB was shighlighting here how 2023 was set to be the first year of the 21st century with no major G7 election.

So 2024 will be a big change from 2023. Clearly many elections will be relatively routine affairs, but as we saw from the Dutch election last week, there can be surprises.

The mains ones to watch are:

• The US Presidential Election in November. A Trump victory, assuming he is the Republican nominee, plus a Republican sweep in Congress, could bring substantive policy changes.
• The Taiwanese election in January 2024 could help shape US-China relations over the next few years.
• European Parliamentary elections in June. Given the relatively high polling numbers for the far right across parts of Europe and the recent Dutch result, this election could test the capacity of the traditional mainstream parties to maintain a majority and the Commission’s ability to push further EU integration, such as with the “open strategic autonomy” agenda.
• Indian elections in April/May. Political stability is behind our view that their economy will double in size out to 2030

So, to paraphrase Reid, stand by for the busiest political year ever.