A year of elections in democracies around the world is revealing deep dissatisfaction among voters

In a community center in East London, about 20 men gathered for their regular lunch meeting, sipping coffee and tea from mismatched mugs and engaging in an increasingly popular pastime in the world’s democracies: Complaining about their government. And inside her cheerfully cluttered craft shop in Greeley, Colorado, Sally Otto, 58, contemplated with dread the upcoming U.S. presidential election between President Joe Biden and the man he defeated in 2020, former President Donald Trump: “I feel like we’re back where we were, with the same two poor choices,” Otto said. “In many ways we’ve never had it so good, objectively speaking, and yet people are so unsatisfied,” said Matthias Matthijs, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. ECONOMY, CULTURE AND POLITICS FUELING ANGER The reasons for the dissatisfaction are many, from social media’s ability to magnify problems to the painful recovery from the coronavirus pandemic to the backlash toward economic and cultural changes sparked by globalization and mass immigration. “It’s about economics and culture, but it’s also about the functioning of politics itself,” said Richard Wike, managing director of Pew’s Global Attitudes Research, citing polarization of voters into warring camps. “Now it has.” In India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been criticized for eroding the world’s most populous democracy, the Pew poll found the country had the highest support among all surveyed countries for a more authoritarian form of government, with two-thirds of respondents there backing a strong leader system of government.