Geopolitics and Markets Review – 1st January 2024

The Year of Elections

Contents

1. Introduction

2. Looking Ahead To 2024

3. A Year of Elections

4. Concluding Remarks

5. Other News

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The Bitesize Edition

• Happy New Year to all! As we head into 2024, it's useful to assess the current field of geopolitics. Superpower geopolitics is currently taking a temporary hiatus. But geopolitics is still set for large changes in 2024.

• Many states are set for elections, including the United States, Taiwan, the UK, and Venezuela, which I discuss today. There are many other elections I’ll dive into over the coming weeks.

• These elections have the chance to alter the structure of the current multipolar world. Slovakia’s election in late 2023 saw a pro-Russia candidate elected to power. Shifts in domestic politics will affect geopolitics going forward. Diving into these elections now will allow us to be prepared when they arrive, and to process the results of said elections.

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Introduction

After a year of writing 2023 in the title for my Geopolitics and Markets Review, I had to be careful this week.

Happy New Year to everyone! To mark the new year, I’ll provide my thoughts on potential driving factors in geopolitics for 2024. There’s a lot to discuss, so I'll release my thoughts over the next two weeks.

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Looking Ahead To 2024

The APEC Summit in San Francisco demonstrated many shifts in geopolitics, at least on a temporary timescale. China has domestic economic worries after inflating its real estate sector, and the United States enters an election year at a time when internal politics is in the most confrontational state seen in decades.

Superpower geopolitics in 2024 will take a breather. Domestic and regional politics and geopolitics, however, will certainly not be taking a break.

In periods of geopolitical tension, as indicated by researchers such as Ray Dalio and David Murrin, the political scale tends to tilt towards the ends, and we see a rise in populism.

In the Slovak election in late 2023, we saw a pro-Russian candidate elected to power. There is plenty of potential in 2024 to see further shifts such as this occur.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

These elections when combined have the potential to shift the entire multipolar world. Those who currently line up on one side could flip overnight. In a conversation I had in the comments of my piece on Israel and Palestine, a commenter said, “Countries don’t vote, people do.” We’ll certainly discover this over the coming year. Whether the elections are a true representation of the people is another issue entirely.

Who specifically has elections that we should pay attention to? How are the people in these nations currently polling as a collective? What dramatic shifts can we consider now, so we aren’t caught off guard by them later?