Ten Elections to Watch in 2025

Incumbents facing the voters in 2025 must be nervous. Two thousand twenty-four began as the mother of all election years with eighty countries representing four billion people holding elections. It ended as the year of the challenger. Voters across the globe, including in the United States and the United Kingdom, sent incumbent parties packing. Long-governing parties in India, Japan, South Africa, and elsewhere held on to power but saw their political majorities narrow. Regardless of the hemisphere, time zone, or growth rate, voters voted against the status quo.  

We will see if that anti-incumbent mood carries over into 2025. Many fewer countries are voting this year, but the results will still matter to their citizens and possibly for others beyond their borders. What follows are ten elections to watch. In most cases, we know when voters will head to the polls. But in some cases, the precise date remains to be set. And the list of critical elections in 2025 could grow. The collapse of the French government last week could lead France to hold parliamentary elections in the second half of 2025 and possibly even a presidential election. Other unplanned elections could materialize as governments fall, whether because of routine parliamentary maneuvers, protests in the streets, or coups.

Belarus’s Presidential Election, January 26. Sometimes elections are a mirage from the start. Belarus’s presidential election next month is an example. When Belarusians voted five years ago, they appeared to send incumbent President Alexander Lukashenko, who had won every election since Belarus become independent in 1994, into retirement. Lukashenko, however, was uninterested in calling it quits. Belarus’s election commission announced he had won his sixth term in office in a landslide. Protests erupted across the country. Security forces immediately cracked down. The actual winner, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, went into exile, where she continues to organize anti-Lukashenko forces. She had become a candidate only after her husband, a leading opposition figure, was jailed and eventually sentenced to prison for eighteen years on trumped up charges. Lukashenko crushed his opponents with the help of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was not eager to see a neighboring country embrace democratic change. The move left Belarus a de-facto vassal to Russia. Lukashenko will now run for his seventh term. He is not leaving things to chance. The only political parties he is allowing to operate all back him. He also has signed a law that gives him lifetime immunity and generous access to government resources should he ever step down as president. That law also bars opposition leaders living abroad from running for president. That clause looks to be aimed at Tsikhanouskaya. So the odds are good that the seventy-year-old Lukashenko will be taking the presidential oath of office yet again.

Ecuador’s General Election, February 9. Incumbent President Daniel Noboa is seeking reelection in Ecuador’s national election. He was elected only last year. That race came about because the then-incumbent president called a snap election after he was impeached for a second time. Noboa, the son of an Ecuadorean billionaire who ran five failed campaigns for president, was the surprise winner. He was just days shy of his thirty-sixth birthday and is the world’s youngest elected government leader. Noboa ran then and now as an opponent of what he calls Ecuador’s “old politics.” He enacted some changes to Ecuador’s fiscal system once in office and secured a $4 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund to ease the country’s extensive foreign debt load. But in September, Ecuador began to experience electric blackouts brought on by a prolonged drought that reduced its once abundant hydroelectric power. Crime is also an issue. Ecuador has the highest homicide rate in South America, and violence by organized criminal groups has forced Noboa to declare states of emergency. Noboa’s main challenger is Luisa González. A protégé of former leftwing President Rafael Correa, who was convicted of corruption and now lives in exile in Belgium, she lost to Noboa in the 2023 run-off. Ecuador’s Election Tribunal has disqualified another challenger, businessman Jan Topic, on conflict-of-interest grounds. If no one wins either 50 percent of the vote, or 40 percent of the vote plus a ten-point lead over the runner-up, Ecuador will hold a runoff election on April 13.

Kosovan Parliamentary Election, February 9. Kosovo’s February parliamentary election will mark a milestone in the country’s fourteen-year history. Prime Minister Albin Kurti's Lëvizja Vetevendosje (LVV), or Self-Determination Party, will become the first Kosovan party to complete a full, four-year term in office. The 2025 elections will take place in the shadow of continuing tensions with neighboring Serbia, which insists that Kosovo is a Serbian province and not an independent country. Ethnic Serbians dominate northern Kosovo and operate an essentially separate government apparatus with Serbia’s support. The impasse over a bridge spanning the Ibar River in the northern city of Mitrovica embodies the tensions that divide the country as a whole. The bridge has been closed to vehicular traffic since 2011 because ethnic Serbians say that opening it up would enable ethnic Albanians to attack them. The EU and NATO have long sought to facilitate a rapprochement between Kosovo and Serbia without much success. Not only do the two sides have conflicting aims, Russia backs Serbia’s claims. Polls in Kosovo are scarce, but the LVV looks poised to win a plurality, if not a majority, of seats in February. It is a left-of-center social democratic party that currently leads a coalition government in association with non-Serbian minority lawmakers. The LVV is suspicious of both the EU and the United States, which worry that the LVV is enflaming tensions with Serbia. The LVV in turn accuses the EU and the United States of appeasing Serbia.

German Bundestag Election, February 23, 2025. Germany’s February election could be the most consequential vote in 2025. Germans are headed to the polls earlier than scheduled because the governing coalition composed of Social Democrats, the Green Party, and the Free Democrats collapsed last month in the wake of conflicting policy visions, personal animosities, and poor performances in recent state (länder) elections. The center-right Christian Democrats now look to be the party to beat. They are led by Friedrich Mertz and have the support of one-in-three German voters. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is polling in second with around 18 percent, while the Social Democrats stand at 16 percent. Current Chancellor Olaf Scholz will lead the Social Democrats into the election after popular Defense Minister Boris Pistorius opted not the challenge him for the party’s leadership. The Green Party stands at just 13 percent in the polls. With no party likely to win a majority of seats in the new Bundestag, the speculation is already turning to the make-up on Germany’s next coalition government. The Christian Democrats have ruled out forming a coalition with the AfD because of its extreme right-wing views. However, the contours of any coalition will depend on the election results and whether smaller parties like the Free Democrats win enough votes to be seated in the Bundestag. The stability of Germany’s next coalition government will in turn depend on whether it can address rather than avoid the country’s, and Europe’s, significant economic and foreign policy challenges.

Australian Parliamentary Elections, by May 17 and September 27. Australians will have two chances in 2025 to select their national government. Elections for the roughly half the seventy-six seats in the Australian Senate will be held by May 17. All 150 seats in the House, which selects the prime minister, will be decided before September 27. Incumbent Prime Minister Anthony Albanese hopes that the voters will give his center-left Labor Party a renewed mandate. That may not happen. Albanese’s personal popularity has dipped in recent months, and Peter Dutton, the leader of the center-right Liberal Party, has seen his popularity rise. More important, the Liberal-National coalition, which aligns the Liberal Party with the right-of-center agrarian National Party, leads in the polls. But both party leaders bring baggage to the election. Albanese is running on the slogan of “Building Australia’s Future,” which lays out an ambitious spending agenda on education, health, and other social programs. He is hoping that voters will forget the flap over his purchase of a high-priced beachside mansion during a national housing crisis and the accusations leveled in fall 2024 that he and other members of his government violated rules on booking airfare when they travel on government business. Dutton pledges to “get Australia back on track” by taming energy, housing, and living costs. However, he has rubbed many Australians the wrong way with controversial statements and questionable actions when he was previously in government. Neither Albanese nor Dutton is proposing significant changes to U.S.-Australian relations.

Gabonese General Election, August. The people of Gabon may get a chance at democracy in 2025. The country was led for fifty-six years first by Omar Bongo and then by his son Ali Bongo. The younger Bongo won election in 2009 upon his father’s death and then again in 2016 in a vote marred by irregularities. He stood for election again in August 2023. Just hours after Gabon’s electoral commission announced his reelection, members of the country’s elite presidential guard overthrew him. It was the seventh coup in Central and West Africa since 2020. In November 2023, the ruling military junta pledged to hold national elections in August 2025. Last month, Gabonese citizens voted overwhelmingly in favor of a new constitution. It establishes a seven-year presidential term, limits presidents to two terms, bars family members from succeeding a president, and requires presidents to have at least one Gabon-born parent and a Gabonese spouse. That latter requirement was aimed squarely at Ali Bongo, whose wife is French. What the new constitution does not do is bar the leader of the military junta, General Brice Oliugi Nguema, from running for president. The forty-nine year-old has yet to say whether he will run, but he is widely expected to. Gabon is an oil-rich member of OPEC with one of the highest per-capita GDP’s in Africa. Whether a new Gabonese government will curtail the country’s rampant corruption and direct the benefits of its oil resources to society as a whole remains to be seen.

Bolivian General Election, August 17. When Bolivians last went to the polls in 2020, they elected Luis Arce, a moderate in the leftist Movement for Socialism (MAS) Party. Many Bolivians hoped that he would calm Bolivia after the rocky ending of the presidency of his mentor Evo Morales, the first person of indigenous descent to be elected president of Bolivia. Morales was first elected in 2005 and remained in office for the next fourteen years despite a ban on a president serving more than two terms. He finally resigned the presidency in 2019 in the face of mass protests over charges that he won his fourth term in office fraudulently. An unstable interim presidency followed before Arce took office. Although he had been Morales’s finance minister for twelve years, the two men had a bitter falling out once Arce was in office. He was expelled from the MAS Party in October 2023, and this past September Morales organized anti-government protests that turned violent. A Bolivian court last month barred Morales from running for president again because he has served two terms already. Arce can run again but he is deeply unpopular. Economic growth has slowed, poverty is growing, and Morales and others have accused him of organizing a “self-coup” this summer in a bid to regain public favor. With the MAS Party divided against itself, the question is whether any of Bolivia’s other political parties can make a persuasive case to the Bolivian public and govern effectively if they get the chance.

Tanzanian General Election, October. Tanzania’s democracy may be on the ballot in its national elections next fall. Africa’s fifth most populous country began holding multiparty elections in the early 1990s, but its politics have been dominated for six decades by the Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) Party. The opening up of the country’s politics came to a halt in 2015 with the election of John Magufuli. He cracked down on his political opponents as well as on the press. Magufuli died in 2021 and was succeeded by Samia Suluhu Hassan, Tanzania’s first woman president. Under the banner of the “4Rs” initiative—Reconciliation, Resilience, Reforms and Rebuilding—she initially reversed Magufuli’s crackdown. Opposition parties were allowed to hold public rallies and press restrictions were eased. But the commitment to political openness quickly faded. Amidst personnel turmoil in her government and with the main opposition party Chadema gaining popularity, repression returned. Several opposition leaders were arrested, one was kidnapped and brutally murdered, and police began breaking up political rallies. The government’s actions triggered international condemnation. That criticism has yet to produce a relaxation of repression. All signs point to Samia running for reelection as the CCM’s candidate. Her main opponent looks to be Tundu Lissu, the deputy leader of Chadema. A lawyer by trade, he was seriously wounded by unknown gunmen in 2017. He then spent three years in exile in Belgium. He and Chadema’s chairman were arrested in September 2024, raising questions about whether he will in fact get to challenge Samia.  

Canadian Federal Election, on or Before October 20. A year after watching their neighbor to the south choose a new leader, Canadians will have the chance to do the same. Incumbent Prime Minister Justin Trudeau heads into 2025 with less than one-out-of-three Canadians approving of his job performance and some of his fellow Liberal Party members calling for him to step down. A big part of his problem is familiarity. He has been prime minister since 2015. Many Canadians also believe that Canada has taken in too many immigrants while neglecting problems at home. The biggest beneficiary of Trudeau’s declining popularity has been the Conservative Party and its leader Pierre Poilievre. In the 2021 Canadian federal elections, the Conservative Party won the most votes nationwide. However, the vagaries of Canada’s electoral system meant that the Liberals won the most seats. Early polls say that this time around the Conservatives will win both the most votes and the most parliamentary seats. Poilievre, who grew up in Alberta, has mostly attacked Trudeau’s policies rather than put forth detailed policies of his own. A Conservative government would likely champion lower taxes and less government regulation. While Canadian law requires the federal election to be held by October 20, it could come earlier—or even later. Opposition parties could force a new election as early as this spring. At the same time, the deadline for the national elections could be moved to October 27 to avoid a conflict with the Hindu festival of Diwali.

Honduran General Election, by November. In November 2021, Hondurans elected Xiomara Castro president, the first woman to hold the position. She was not a stranger, however, to the presidential palace. Her husband, Manuel Zelaya, was president from 2006 until he was ousted by a military coup in 2009. Castro was the candidate of the left-of-center Liberty and Refoundation (LIBRE) Party. She promised to break with the policies of the National Party, which had run Honduras since her husband’s ouster. That meant tackling drug trafficking, curbing corruption, and expanding women’s rights. Castro’s predecessor, Juan Orlando Hernández, had been accused of having ties to drug traffickers. Shortly after taking office, she ordered him extradited to the United States to face drug charges. In the two years since, she has had some success reducing street crime, expanding social welfare programs, and improving roads. However, she has yet to implement her signature promise to create an international commission to investigate corruption. This summer, a video surfaced of her brother-in-law negotiating with drug traffickers to get bribes for Zelaya when he was president. Castro then accused Washington of fomenting a coup against her and ended the U.S.-Honduras’s extradition treaty. President-Elect Donald Trump’s vow to deport undocumented migrants could further strain U.S.-Honduran relations and the Honduran economy. A half million Honduran migrants are vulnerable to deportation. Some commentators worry that Castro might begin to mimic the authoritarian leaders in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. That could blunt Honduras’s progress and further complicate U.S. policy in the region.

Oscar Berry and Maxwell Fisher assisted in the preparation of this post.

Other posts in this series:

Ten Elections to Watch in 2024

Five Elections to Watch in 2023

Ten Elections to Watch in 2022

Ten Elections to Watch in 2021

Ten Elections to Watch in 2020

Ten Elections to Watch in 2019

Ten Elections to Watch in 2018

Ten Elections to Watch in 2017

Ten Elections to Watch in 2016

Ten Elections to Watch in 2015

Ten Elections to Watch in 2014