Political upsets in our times

Mark Carney, to use a cliché, has snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. His Liberal Party was way behind the Conservatives and had Justin Trudeau still been in office would have lost the election. Even when Carney took charge of the country following Trudeau's resignation, there was a widespread feeling that he would be unable to have his party make a turnaround and retain power. Now that Carney has done it, Canadians as well as election watchers around the world are impressed.

Of course, what we have seen in Canada and then in Australia, where Antony Albanese has led his party to a second consecutive election victory, has been linked to Donald Trump. In the months since he took over from Joe Biden, Trump has caused consternation all around, not least in Canada, which he has derisively referred to as America's 51st state. As for Australia, the Trump tariffs were a major factor in guaranteeing Albanese's hold on power. In both Ottawa and Canberra, these election upsets are for many of us a reminder of how voting can sometimes throw up interesting, and encouraging, results.

The results of Pakistan's general election of December 1970 are a pointer to what we in our part of the world experienced at the ballot box fifty-four years ago. It was Pakistan's very first election and would soon lead to the dismemberment of the country through the emergence of its eastern wing as Bangladesh. In the run-up to the voting, though, political observers did not quite expect the Awami League to achieve the kind of electoral triumph it did. That the party would come by a majority enabling it to form the central government was rather unexpected, but there it was.

Again, in West Pakistan, many expected the rightists, in a clutch of parties such as the various factions of the Muslim League, the Jamaat-e-Islami, the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Pakistan and others, to obtain a majority of seats in Balochistan, Sindh, Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province. In the event, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's three-year-old Pakistan People's Party romped home with a majority of the seats earmarked for Pakistan's western wing.

An election result which rocked the world was the defeat of India's ruling Congress at the ballot box in March 1977. Having presided over a state of emergency for nearly two years, Indira Gandhi, in office as Prime Minister since January 1966, bit the dust. For the very first time since India gained independence from Britain in 1947, the Indian National Congress was out of power. A far bigger upset, though, was the decisive return of the Congress under Indira Gandhi to office only three years later.

The Janata Party, which ejected the Congress from power in 1977, was by 1980 riven with dissension that was plainly unbridgeable. Besides, the persecution of Indira Gandhi by Prime Minister Morarji Desai and his government swiftly conveyed the impression to the Indian voter that it was essential for the Congress to return as the party of government. The sympathy vote worked together with the public perception of Janata government ineptitude.

In Bangladesh in February 1991, the Sheikh Hasina-led Awami League was widely expected to win the election following the fall of the Ershad regime. Surprisingly, it was the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) which obtained a majority and formed a government under Khaleda Zia.

Electoral upsets have been part of modern American history. President Harry Truman was not expected to win the 1948 election against Thomas Dewey, the Republican Governor of New York. The opinion polls consistently showed Dewey winning the election. On the night of the election, Dewey went to bed confident that he would be President-elect the next morning. By the time he woke up, Truman had won election to the presidency in his own right. He had succeeded Franklin Roosevelt when the latter died barely a month after being inaugurated as President for a fourth term in early 1945.

A major upset, or call it comeback, marked the career of Richard Nixon. Having served as a Congressman, Senator and then as Vice President under President Dwight Eisenhower for eight years, Nixon narrowly lost the 1960 presidential election to Senator John Kennedy. Two years later, he lost to Pat Brown in his bid to become Governor of California.

Nixon spent the next few years writing on foreign policy, visiting global capitals and interacting with leaders and at the mid-term elections of 1966 campaigning for Republican candidates for Congress and the Senate. By the time 1968 came round, he was leading the race for his party's presidential nomination. He won the nomination and then went on to defeat Vice President Hubert Humphrey at the election. A new Nixon had arrived.

There have been upsets other than electoral in modern history. French President Charles de Gaulle called a referendum over a rather minor constitutional issue in April 1969. He made it publicly known that he would resign if he lost the referendum. He lost and retired to his country home in Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, where he died in November 1970.

An upset closer to our times was the Brexit referendum in 2016. Not many expected the government of British Prime Minister David Cameron to lose the vote despite the intense campaign against the country's continued membership of the European Union. A pretty shocked Cameron left office, to be succeeded by Theresa May.

And at this present time, with Nigel Farage's Reform UK party winning local elections and rising in the polls, it is quite conceivable it will replace the Conservative Party, currently led by Kemi Badenoch, as the main opposition at the next parliamentary election. Some Farage fans have meanwhile been voicing the expectation that the Reform UK leader will be Britain's next Prime Minister.

Political upsets and stunning electoral results are part of politics in our times. The rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party and consequent decline of the Congress in India are a phenomenon fast changing the political face of the country. The removal of Nikita Khrushchev from power by the triumvirate of Leonid Brezhnev, Nikolai Podgorny and Alexei Kosygin in 1964 shook up Cold War politics.

In China, the rise and fall and rise of Deng Xiao-ping marked a significant change in post-Mao politics in the country. Add to that the earlier circumstance of the fall of the Gang of Four headed by Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong's widow. It was a decisive move to pull China away from the ravages of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976.

Politics is about a transformation of societies. The reality, though, is that not many expect sudden changes to be normal features of a nation's social structure. But sudden changes do occur --- at the ballot box, on the streets through revolution, by the illegitimacy of coups d'etat and through intrigue fomented by indigenous as well as alien political players. That is the way of the world.

ahsan.syedbadrul@gmail.com