Leaders of Rich Nations Are Deeply Unpopular

BY MAX COLCHESTER AND DAVID LUHNOW

LONDON—One lesson from an unprecedented year of elections around the world is that voters in industrialized countries are particularly unhappy, ready to boot unpopular leaders out of office and making it more difficult for politicians in power to enact bold change.

Rarely have the rich world’s political leaders been so widely disliked. No leader of an industrialized country other than tiny Switzerland has a positive rating, according to a survey of some 25 democracies by pollster Morning Consult. Ruling parties that went to the polls this year largely got a drubbing.

President Biden has a 37% approval rating. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has 26% approval, while France’s Emmanuel Macron sits at 19% and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at 18%, according to Morning Consult. President-elect Donald Trump’s popularity has been rising since he won the November election, but he could start his term with a negative net rating, and he was the only president in modern history to start below 50% in his first term.

Voters in industrialized nations are anxious and angry after years of uncertainty caused by the pandemic, war in Europe, high inflation, stagnant real wages and surging immigration. Leaders are struggling to respond, constrained by tepid economic growth, higher borrowing costs and ballooning deficits that mean they increasingly are offering voters tough choices and trade-offs.

It is a message many voters don’t want to hear, setting the stage for an era of more fractious politics as parties squabble about how to share an economic pie that, with the notable exception of the U.S., isn’t growing. In European countries, it also threatens a kind of political doom loop, where unpopular leaders, often trying to hold together disparate coalition governments, struggle to pass meaningful legislation, preventing them from solving the problems voters elected them to fix.

Fragile governments

France’s government collapsed this past week for the first time since 1962 after a fight over budget cuts under Macron. In November, Germany’s coalition government collapsed over disagreements on economic policy, triggering a vote in February that spells likely defeat for Scholz. South Korea’s unpopular president, Yoon Suk Yeol, faces a second impeachment attempt this weekend after he declared a brief period of martial law, also tied to budget fights.

The upshot: Brace yourself for more political turbulence. This dysfunction is creating fertile ground for opposition parties, populists and antiestablishment politicians. And aided by social media, political cycles are going into overdrive. In the U.S., the incumbent party has lost three consecutive elections for the first time since the 1890s.

Even new leaders aren’t getting much of a honeymoon. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who ousted the unpopular Rishi Sunak when he won an election in July, has an approval rating of just 30% compared with 59% disapproval. His ratings took a hit after his Labour government’s first budget increased taxes to try to plug a funding gap.

This doesn’t bode well for liberal democracies, said Seema Shah, who assesses elections at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. “People are dissatisfied with the quality of their life, and the institutions they look to for help are weak.”

Voters revenge

In a year when half the world’s population had a chance to vote, the results show the electorate is angrier in the rich world compared with developing countries, where leaders are more popular— or at least less unpopular.

Of the 71 national polls held worldwide so far this year, about a third resulted in incumbents being voted out of office, said Shah’s organization.

But turnover was far higher in industrialized countries. In slow-growing Europe, six incumbents were replaced out of the 10 major national parliamentary and presidential elections held so far this year, and virtually every incumbent party saw its vote share fall compared with the last election. Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party lost its outright majority and Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s fragile minority government isn’t expected to last through the coming year.

“Being an incumbent in the industrialized world used to be an advantage, but it is increasingly a disadvantage. Most of them lose,” said Ruchir Sharma, the head of hedge fund Rockefeller Capital Management’s international business. The average popularity ratings of the seven richest countries’ leaders gradually has been trending down since the pandemic, says Morning Consult.

In nearly half of the world’s top 35 developed countries, hourly wages, when adjusted for inflation, are below their 2019 level, says the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Only 24% of respondents in the developed world said they expected to be better off in five years versus 61% in developing countries, shows a 2023 survey by public- relations firm Edelman.

The big exception is the U.S., but the wage growth there has been uneven. Average incomes have risen, but that is largely driven by gains among top earners. Median incomes are slightly down compared with 2019, meaning many Americans aren’t feeling better off.

Costs of aging

Rich countries have a problem that poorer ones don’t: They are aging rapidly, which means their costs for healthcare, pensions and other spending are rising quickly as their economic growth has stagnated, meaning less tax revenue to pay for services. In the past two decades, governments in rich countries have turned to borrowing to plug the gap. But that has largely reached its limits.