What’s at stake in the five countries that go to the polls in 2025
Authoritarians in Belarus and the Philippines will be emboldened while Germany’s fragile ruling coalition and Canada’s Justin Trudeau may be shown the door.
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The coming 12 months can’t promise the bumper crop of elections we saw during 2024, when countries home to about half the world’s population headed to the polls. Still, voters will cast ballots in several important elections throughout the year – and many of the themes persist: the impact of inflation, the rise of the populist right and the fallout of war in Europe and the Middle East.
Only a fool or charlatan will pretend to predict the future, so it’s usually best to avoid election forecasting. So instead, The Conversation asked experts on five countries – Canada, Germany, Chile, Belarus and the Philippines – to explain what is at stake as those nations go to the ballot.
Belarus (January 26)
Tatsiana Kulakevich, associate professor of instruction, School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies, the University of South Florida.
Alexander Lukashenko, Europe’s longest-serving authoritarian ruler, will run for his seventh term on January 26, 2025 – and he is not expected to lose.
No real opposition will participate in the upcoming elections against Lukashenko, who has run the country since 1994.
Four other persons seeking nomination include the head of the Liberal Democratic Party, Aleh Haidukevich, who ran in the 2020 elections, but withdrew his candidacy then in favor of Lukashenko; Hanna Kanapatskaya, a former member of...
