2025 starts under the effects of a deep post-election hangover. It is the year of Donald Trump’s return to the presidency of the United States. A year of political gesticulation and personalism, of unpredictability and reconfiguration of power, both public and private, all symbolized by the alliance of interests of the new tenant of the White House and the richest tycoon in the world, Elon Musk.
They are the main exponents of this “egopolitics” that has emerged reinforced from the polls. It is the triumph of narcissism over charisma. Anti-politics is consolidated in the face of traditional parties that are increasingly distant from their historical voters. But, are we facing a Trump factor of change or before political fuss and fireworks?
It remains to be seen to what extent we enter a year that will further reinforce the containment and withdrawal dams that have been bunkering societies and fragmenting global hyperconnectivity; or, on the contrary, we will see the emergence of a still timid willingness to think about alternative policies that provide answers to the true causes of unrest and attempt to rebuild increasingly fragile consensuses.
For now, the electoral cyclone of 2024 has left democracy a little more bruised and a world mobilized from anger, discomfort or fear. Many of the 1.6 billion of voters who went to the polls did so, in general, to punish the parties in power: in the United States, France, Ireland, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Uruguay or Panama. Even those who have resisted have emerged weakened, as witnessed by the electoral disaster of the Ishiba Shigeru Government in Japan, or the necessary coalitions in Narendra Modi’s India and Cyril Ramaphosa’s South Africa.
The new institutional path in the European Union is also based on historically weak parliamentary support, pending Germany, which will go to the polls in February with its economic model in flux, rampant social unrest, and with doubts about the political strength that it can show. elections that have the Alternative for Germany (AfD) ultras as the second force in voting intentions in the polls.
The democratic volatility of the West collides with the geopolitical hyperactivity of the Global South and the virulence of the hotbeds of war.
Truces without peace
The global geopolitical upheaval closes the year with the unexpected collapse of Bashar al Assad’s Syrian regime. But, also, with the three-way meeting between Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky and Emmanuel Macron in Paris within the framework of the reopening of Notre Dame.
Diplomatic compasses and war acceleration collide on international political agendas. And Russia, which has become the common thread that weaves together the latest events in Syria and Ukraine, is responsible for sending the reminder that any diplomatic movement must also go through Moscow. In this context, in 2025 there will be talk of a ceasefire, but not of peace.
The electoral announcements of a Trump determined to end the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours” led, from the outset, to an intensification of the war on the ground. And, although in 2025 the diplomatic offensive will gain ground, it remains to be seen what the plan is, who will sit at the table and what real willingness the parties will have to reach an agreement. For the European Union this is an essential battle, so as not to be excluded from a possible negotiation on the immediate future of a State called to be a member of the EU and in which, at this moment, the security of the continent is decided.
In any case, the Middle East has already demonstrated the fragility and limited credibility of this strategy of cessation of hostilities without sufficient capacity or consensus to seek lasting solutions. 2025 starts with a change of objectives in the region, but without pacification. The Syrian civil war, festering since the Arab uprisings of 2011, is entering a new phase.
We are witnessing a profound regional geopolitical recomposition because Syria had for years become an indirect battlefield in the United States’ relations with Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. We are, therefore, faced with completely open scenarios, where any negotiation proposal that is proposed will be more of a strategic move than a preliminary step to address the fundamental causes of the conflicts. And yet, these diplomatic movements – which respond, above all, to individual and personal initiatives – will once again test an international system weighed down by ineffectiveness when it comes to achieving broad global consensus or serving as platforms for resolve disputes.
Therefore, even if in 2025 the world sets its sights on opportunities for negotiation or cessation of hostilities, the decomplexation of this world without rules will continue its own acceleration.
Global institutional dismantling
In 2025, the crisis of multilateral cooperation may reach its peak if personalism takes the lead and further damages the consensual spaces for conflict resolution, from the United Nations, to the International Criminal Court or the World Trade Organization. , which celebrates 30 years since its creation and does so with a trade war threat on the horizon which reflects the state of institutional crisis that blocks the arbiter of international trade.
We are in a world that is already less cooperative and more defensive, but now the debate on the financing of this post-1945 institutional architecture may contribute to redoubling the structural weakness of multilateralism.
For all these reasons, countries seek to strengthen their positions through a plurality of alliances. The world is increasingly plurilateral. India expands its free trade agreements with the United Kingdom and in Latin America. The EU, for its part, will finally face a difficult obstacle course this year to ratify the long-negotiated agreement with Mercosur.
Furthermore, Trumpism reinforces this transactionality: it fuels the possibility of more unpredictable alliances and the need for adaptation, especially in the face of a Sino-American rivalry that can lead to a trade and technological war.
In 2025 we will see how protectionism will gain followers. Countries from the Global South have begun to introduce tariffs against the Chinese technology industry, although with other objectives. While countries like Mexico and Turkey use tariffs to try to force new Chinese investments into their territory – especially in the field of electric vehicles – others, like South Africa, do so to protect their local producers. In this context, an increase in economic insecurity and an acceleration of the fragmentation of the global economy is to be expected, where the greater rapprochement between like-minded countries is already observable.
Fear, as a dynamic that permeates policies both in the immigration field and in international relations, gains ground in 2025: from the acceleration of deportations to global rearmament; from the new boom in nuclearization to the expansion of organized crime.
The speed and depth of geopolitical changes multiply the questions for both analysts and international relations actors themselves. Faced with this horizon, the multialignment efforts that many countries in the world are trying to deploy, with security as the central core, are becoming increasingly complex as the confrontation between the great global powers intensifies.
Carme Colomina Saló, senior researcher at CIDOB, Barcelona Center for International Affairs. This article is part of the collective reflection of the CIDOB research team “The world in 2025: ten issues that will mark the international agenda”
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