• NATO
• United States
• India

December 28, 2024, 6:00 AM View Comments ()

2024 was the year the world voted, as a Foreign Policy cover declared in January. In total, nearly half of the global population cast ballots in more than 50 countries, and from those elections, each of the five politicians featured below entered a new phase of their careers.

Mark Rutte, the new secretary-general of NATO, didn’t have to run for office to win his position, but his tenure will be shaped by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. For a man such as Rutte who loves nothing more than routine, as FP’s Caroline de Gruyter documents, Trump’s reemergence on the international stage could spell trouble.

Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first woman president and the chosen successor to former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has been cited in countless think pieces this year for bucking the global trend of ousted incumbents. Yet, Ana Sofía Rodríguez Everaert writes, Sheinbaum faces even steeper challenges now that she has won office.

As India’s foreign secretary, S. Jaishankar is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “chief messenger” to the world, FP’s Rishi Iyengar writes. Though their stars have long risen in tandem, Modi and Jaishankar are now part of a diminished coalition following India’s general election earlier this year.

Jaishankar’s British counterpart, David Lammy, was swept into office in a landslide Labour Party victory led by Keir Starmer this July; how will Lammy, whom Marie Le Conte profiled later that month, navigate his country’s fractured relationship with the European Union, a beleaguered Ukraine, and a U.S. president-elect he has criticized in public?

Finally, in April, Sinem Dedetas was elected mayor of one of Turkey’s most conservative municipalities—and as Joshua Levkowitz writes, some analysts are convinced that she could eventually lead the charge of a mobilized opposition in the country.

Elections are about numbers, but they’re also about people. Enjoy these meditations on the inextricable tie between personality and politics.

1. NATO’s New Leader Was Planning This the Whole Time

by Caroline de Gruyter, June 20

Mark Rutte, who succeeded Jens Stoltenberg as the secretary-general of NATO in October, hates surprises. “Every year, he rents the same simple holiday house with family members,” FP columnist Caroline de Gruyter writes, documenting how the former Dutch prime minister has embraced a life of ritual and routine.

Now Rutte must find a way to lead the trans-Atlantic alliance through choppy waters alongside an incoming U.S. president who has expressed skepticism about its very existence. Asked by de Gruyter whether he has a vision, one of Rutte’s former advisors is adamant: “No. I don’t remember him rejecting one piece of advice I gave him, in all those years, ever. For vision, he would say, you visit an eye doctor.”

2. The Woman Inheriting AMLO’s Revolution

by Ana Sofía Rodríguez Everaert, May 14

Claudia Sheinbaum greets supporters during her presidential campaign launch event in Mexico City on March 1. Jaime Lopez/Getty Images

Succeeding her mentor, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Claudia Sheinbaum achieved a landslide victory in Mexico’s June election. The country’s first woman president is singular for other reasons, too, writes Ana Sofía Rodríguez Everaert, who tracks Sheinbaum’s political awakening in the mid-1980s as well as her rise as a professional and data-driven politician in Mexico City.

“Sheinbaum should expect equally unprecedented governing challenges,” Everaert warns. “She will face enormous expectations while Mexican society is becoming more fragmented than ever.”

3. Modi’s Messenger to the World

by Rishi Iyengar, April 5

As part of our spring print issue on India, FP reporter Rishi Iyengar took a close look at the country’s foreign secretary, S. Jaishankar. The diplomat-turned-politician, Iyengar writes, serves as “tip of the spear for an unapologetic India” led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, though the two men come from very different backgrounds. Jaishankar’s worldliness—his education at New Delhi’s most elite institutions as well as his Ph.D. in nuclear diplomacy—has well served Modi, who comes from far humbler beginnings.

Modi “wanted someone he trusted who could actually do the big moves,” FP columnist C. Raja Mohan tells Iyengar. “I think you could say that has largely paid off.”

4. Britain’s New Foreign Secretary Hates Trump and Loves America

by Marie Le Conte, July 8

With a general election just weeks away, the man who is now Britain’s foreign secretary sat down for an interview with Marie Le Conte. The conversation covered his priorities in office—among them, climate action and resetting the fractious U.K.-EU relationship—as well as Britain’s ties to the United States.

Overall, Lammy’s view of the world, he tells LeConte, is one of “progressive realism—meeting the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be.” That will be put to the test once Trump takes office. (Lammy, a Harvard graduate, is friends with former U.S. President Barack Obama and has spoken before about the dangers that Trump poses to the international order.) Lammy’s encounter with LeConte gives the reader a sense of how he will seek to navigate a changing special relationship.

5. The New Face of Turkey’s Opposition

by Joshua Levkowitz, Sept. 23

Recep Tayyip Erdogan may be riding high after the recent fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, but at home, a broad opposition is mobilizing against Turkey’s longtime leader. That opposition includes a newly elected class of women leaders in provinces and districts across the country, reports Joshua Levkowitz. Chief among them is Sinem Dedetas, who in April made history as the first woman to ever win the mayorship of the conservative municipality of Uskudar.

Dedetas’s career has featured many firsts—“and this is just the start of her office,” a one-time party rival tells Levkowitz. “There are already rumors that she will be the next candidate for Istanbul mayor.” And as a saying in Turkish politics goes, whoever wins Istanbul will one day win Turkey.