POLLS APART

More than 2 billion people could vote in 2024, the biggest year ever for global democracy. But electoral systems face multiple pressures including AI manipulation, far-right extremism and crackdowns on free speech and dissent. Our correspondents preview some of the most significant elections-and the threats facing them 

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The 60th US presidential election will be quite unlike any that has gone before as America and the rest of the world, braces for a contest amid fears of eroding democracy and the looming threat of authoritarianism.

It will be a fight marked by numerous unwanted firsts as the oldest president in the country's history is likely to face the first former US president to stand trial on criminal charges. A once aspirational nation will continue its plunge into anxiety and divisions about crime, immigration, race, foreign wars and the cost of living.

Democrat Joe Biden, 81, is preparing for the kind of gruelling campaign he was able to avoid during coronavirus lockdowns in 2020. Republican Donald Trump will spend some of his campaign in a courtroom and has vowed authoritarian-style retribution ifhe wins. For voters it is a time of stark choices, unique spectacles and simmering danger.

"It feels to me as if America is sitting on a powder keg and the fuse has been lit," said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. "The protective shield that all democracies and social orders rely on legitimacy of the governing body, some level of elite responsibility, the willingness of citizens to view their neighbours in a civic way - is in an advanced stage of decline or collapse.

"It's quite possible that the powder keg that America's sitting on will explode over the course of 2024," said Jacobs.

US politics entered a new, turbulent era with Trump's shocking victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. The businessman and reality TV star, tapping into populist rage against the establishment, was the first president with no political or military experience.

His chaotic four-year presidency was scarred by the Covid-19 pandemic and ended with a bitter defeat by Biden in a 2020 election that was itself billed as an unprecedented stress test of democracy.