A crucial year for elections worldwide

After a year of significant elections in which long-serving leaders left power in Germany and Israel, the election landscape is even bigger in 2022. Eye-catching votes in every continent will shape not just domestic politics and economics, but also international relations well in the 2020s.

In Europe, the standout is the French presidential election. While incumbent Emmanuel Macron is the favorite, a recent poll showed for the first time that he could lose the second round run-off in April to Valerie Pecresse from the right-of-center Republicans.

Pecresse, a combative former minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, has enjoyed a bounce in the polls since winning her party’s nomination on Dec. 4. In the campaign, she is highlighting several key international issues, including migration, to peel off support from far-right rivals Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour.

Pecresse is calling for a “European awakening,” proposing a tightening of the Schengen free movement area. She also wants to bolster the returns directive on expulsion rules for migrants in the EU, and end EU enlargement, including the termination of accession talks with Turkey.

As a political centrist, Macron is aware of the risks he faces if the election swings on migration issues, and wants instead to focus on economic priorities such as reshaping the European single market and protecting European jobs. In his own words, “We must have one obsession in 2022 — it is to create jobs and fight unemployment,” and he plans to use the French presidency of the EU in the first half of 2022 to promote this agenda.

In Asia-Pacific, the big one may be the Australian general election on or before May 21, when Prime Minister Scott Morrison will try to secure a fourth consecutive term for the conservative Liberal-National coalition government. While the opposition Labor Party has generally led polls in 2021, Morrison is still widely seen as the preferred person to be prime minister, and the result is therefore highly uncertain in the middle of the pandemic.

To continue to hold a majority, Morrison’s government cannot afford to lose a single seat, and for Labor to win a majority it will need to pick up seven. This will be challenging for both sides, as the coalition holds two seats with margins of less than 1 percent, and Labor has five in that precarious position.

One key international issue in the campaign is China. Morrison is seeking to paint Labor as soft on Beijing after one of the party’s former prime ministers, Paul Keating, claimed Australia had “lost its way” and surrendered its sovereignty to the US under the AUKUS nuclear deal with the UK. To be sure, Labor leader Anthony Albanese has backed AUKUS, but that hasn’t stopped the government claiming too many in his party are “apologists” for China and weak on national security, with Labor punching back that Morrison is heightening rhetoric for domestic political purposes after failing to forge a proper strategy for engaging an increasingly assertive Beijing.

Turning to the Americas, the two eye-catching ballots are in Brazil and the US. In Brazil, polls indicate that former leftist president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva may beat incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in a landslide. Important as that outcome would be domestically, it would have key implications internationally too.

As president, Lula promoted Brazil as a progressive champion of the developing world and leader on environmental issues, which would make a welcome and dramatic departure from Bolsonaro’s record. One tangible change would be climate diplomacy, after Bolsonaro refused to attend COP26 in Glasgow last month,wants to quit the Paris climate treaty, and has presided over a large increase in Amazon deforestation.

In the US, foreign policy issues may not feature prominently in the mid-term congressional elections. Nonetheless, the ballot is still likely to have several key international implications if the Republicans win back one or both chambers.

If that happens, Biden will follow other recent presidents in increasingly turning to foreign policy after their initial period in office; US presidents have more latitude to act independently of Congress in international affairs than in domestic policy, and the political legacy they are keen to build usually includes a desire for key overseas accomplishments.

While the congressional ballot may therefore significantly reshape the domestic context for Biden’s presidency, potential changes of leadership in several other pivotal powers will alter the landscape for US foreign policy during his remaining period of office. He would welcome Bolsonaro losing power, but miss Macron's internationalism, highlighting that the 2022 election season contains both risks and opportunities for him.

• Andrew Hammond is an Associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics