The Biggest Election Year in History

Those risks should be about outcomes and not, of course, about the dangers of voting or of running in the first place. Bangladesh gets the election year started on January 7th, after a bitter campaign in which the opposition complained of politicized arrests and called for a boycott of the vote. But democracy is, in a number of respects, in an even more perilous state in Russia, where Vladimir Putin will almost certainly be re-anointed in an election in March; the man who might have been his most potent challenger, Alexei Navalny, is currently an inmate at a penal colony in Kharp, in Western Siberia. Still, the turnout of Russian voters, and the mood on the street, will reveal something about Putin’s hold on power. (Iran, where elections are contested among a very limited spectrum of candidates, will face a parallel test that same month, following a year of mass protests.) Meanwhile, Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has said that he doesn’t intend for an election scheduled for March to take place, because, given the war, it would be “absolutely irresponsible to throw the topic of elections into society in a lighthearted and playful way.” That choice may be comprehensible. Yet it still feels like a loss, and possibly a tragedy.