It’s not quite a new year resolution, and it’s certainly not a prediction. Think of it instead as a hope or even a plea for the next 12 months. May the coming year see those leaders who have done so much damage to their own countries, and far beyond, at last be called to account. Let 2026 be a year of reckoning.

Start with the man whose reach is longest, by dint of the mighty power he wields. Such is the nature of the US electoral system that Donald Trump, who returned to power less than a year ago, will face the judgment of voters in 10 months’ time. His name will not be on the ballot but, make no mistake, the midterm elections of 3 November will deliver a verdict on the second Trump presidency.

A slew of congressional defeats for his party would be satisfying in itself, wounding that gargantuan ego of his, but it would also have practical significance. Few predict the Republicans losing control of the Senate, where Democrats would have to flip at least four seats to take charge – near-impossible given the geography of the 35 seats up for grabs in November. But, in normal circumstances, it should be the safest of political bets that the House of Representatives will no longer be in Republican hands a year from now.

Such a reverse would dispel the aura of indomitability that has enveloped Trump since he beat Kamala Harris, allowing him to bully and intimidate multiple US institutions, including much of its media, into ceding to him far more power than is rightfully his. It would render him a lame duck, incapable of passing new laws through a hostile chamber.

Above all, it would see Trump confronted at last with a body both eager and able to hold him to account: a Democratic House would have the appetite and the muscle for serious scrutiny. Armed with subpoena power, it could investigate everything from the cost of Trump’s tariffs for US taxpayers to the astonishingly brazen pattern of corruption and pocket-lining that has characterised this administration. And up its sleeve would be the constant threat of a third impeachment trial.

So November could indeed bring a reckoning for Trump, which is why he will stop at nothing to avert that outcome. Hence the words of caution above: “in normal circumstances”. Trump will make the circumstances abnormal, if that’s what it takes to keep the House. That effort is already under way, whether in the form of gerrymandered maps in Texas or moves to make voting harder in Democratic areas across the country.

There are heartening signs of institutions beginning to push back – witness last week’s supreme court decision reining in Trump’s deployment of US troops on the streets of Democrat-led cities – but this will be one of the battles of 2026, as the president stretches every sinew to avoid the accountability an autumn defeat would bring.

In that, he has a soul brother in the man he hosted in Mar-a-Lago this week, in what was their sixth and final meeting of 2025: Benjamin Netanyahu. Except the electoral peril confronting Netanyahu, whose first term as Israel’s prime minister began in 1996, is more direct: at some point between now and October, Israelis will go to the polls in a contest that could remove him from power altogether.

Central will be the holding of Netanyahu to account. Many around the world will want that to be for the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, for the relentless aerial bombardment that has left the strip in ruins and for the withholding of humanitarian aid. But inside Israel, the accountability that is sought most keenly is for the deadly failures of 7 October 2023, for the complacency and strategic errors that left a string of southern communities, and hundreds of people at a music festival, exposed to murderous Hamas attack.

Israeli officials at every level, civilian and military, have paid for that catastrophe with their jobs – bar one. Only Netanyahu has never admitted the slightest responsibility, let alone apologised, for the fact that the deadliest day in the country’s history came on his watch. He has refused to establish a commission of inquiry like those that swiftly followed previous calamities, preferring instead a sham investigation staffed by loyalists – equivalent, as the father of one slain hostage put it, to asking the iceberg to find out who sank the Titanic. So the only chance Israelis will have to hold to account the man who has ruled them for 18 of the past 30 years will be at the ballot box.

The stakes could hardly be higher. Plenty of Israeli campaigners fear this election might be the last chance to save key democratic institutions that have been under sustained assault from Netanyahu for so long. Like Trump in the US or Viktor Orbán in Hungary, who also faces voters this year, Netanyahu has been in an escalating war with the judiciary and independent media, squeezing them ever harder, hoping they will choke. And, like his pal in Washington, Netanyahu will stop at nothing to deny his opponents an electoral victory: on trial on corruption charges, he needs to stay in power in order to stay out of jail. Accountability of both the political and legal varieties terrifies him.

And he is not the only leader in the region fearful of the anger of his own people. Iranians have tried and tried again to vent their fury at the regime that has ruled their country for 47 years, only to be suppressed, often brutally. Protests have erupted once again in recent days, the authorities resorting to lethal force even more rapidly than in the past – though there are encouraging signs that some in the security forces are reluctant to engage in the usual crackdown. For years, many inside Iran have despaired at a regime bent on becoming a regional power by sponsoring terror and mayhem in the Middle East and beyond, with ordinary Iranians paying the price in sanctions and economic pain. The reckoning for that has been postponed, more than once. But the demand for change is loud and, says the scholar of Iran Ali Ansari, “Sooner or later something will have to give.”

In the streets or at the ballot box, accountability could be coming in 2026. In Britain, the Labour government has good reason to fear it, bracing for big losses in every direction, whether to Plaid Cymru in Wales, the Scottish National party in Scotland, the Greens especially in London or Reform UK almost everywhere. In a just world, Nigel Farage would fear the voters, anxious that they would hold him to account not only for his squalid past but as the man who served as chief evangelist for the most disastrous national decision since Munich, namely the Brexit referendum, which marks its 10th anniversary in June.

I concede it’s unlikely that 2026 will see Farage pay for his starring role in that ongoing act of collective self-harm. But eventually Trump, Netanyahu, Orban and the others must face a reckoning for the pain they have caused and the damage they have done. Let this be the year.

• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

• Guardian newsroom: Year One of Trumpism: Is Britain Emulating the US?
  On Wednesday 21 January 2026, join Jonathan Freedland, Tania Branigan and Nick Lowles as they reflect on the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency – and to ask if Britain could be set on the same path.
  Book tickets here or at guardian.live