A respected survey of political freedoms recently concluded that global democracy has been losing ground for at least a dozen years. Freedom House’s annual report states that “More authoritarian powers are now banning opposition groups or jailing their leaders, dispensing with term limits, and tightening the screws on any independent media that remain.” The situation in emerging democracies is little better: many “have regressed in the face of rampant corruption, antiliberal populist movements, and breakdowns in the rule of law.”
The retreat has taken place in established democracies as well, several of which “have been shaken by populist political forces that reject basic principles like the separation of powers and target minorities for discriminatory treatment.” In fact more than half of the 41 countries that Freedom House consistently ranked “free” between 1985 and 2005, have registered noticeable declines during the last five years.
Many of the reversals are obvious. As the UK heads towards its third general election in just over four years and with Spain and Israel even further adrift after multiple national polls, democratic elections seem less capable than ever of offering straightforward answers to urgent political questions. One major reason is election interference. The Brexit referendum and 2016 US elections were notoriously marred by foreign meddling, so were several European polls, and there is no sign that the use of social media to spread disinformation and propaganda will change any time soon. Guardian commentator Simon Tisdall writes that: “The integrity of electoral processes worldwide, including in western countries held up as models, is under growing threat from systemic failures and deliberate subversion.”
With democracy faltering, illiberal alternatives have had a resurgence. Populist and nationalist demagogues have taken advantage of the disillusionment in Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Turkey – to name but a few. But the track record of candidates who promise to ‘drain the swamp’ or carry out similar overhauls of a corrupt political elite has proved, at best, disappointing. This has become a further setback for the idea that democracy is the best remedy to political excesses as recent events in Pakistan, Venezuela and Zimbabwe suggest.
Nevertheless, Freedom House insists that “The promise of democracy remains real and powerful. Not only defending it but broadening its reach is one of the great causes of our time.” It points out that its continued appeal is evident in such varied states as Angola, Armenia, Malaysia, Ecuador, and Ethiopia and that even where it is under siege, in parts of Europe and North America, “dynamic civic movements for justice and inclusion continue to expan[d] the scope of what citizens can and should expect from democracy.”
Countering this progressive trend, illiberal actors like president Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil “damage democracies internally through their dismissive attitude toward core civil and political rights, and they weaken the cause of democracy around the world with their unilateralist reflexes.”
But, as the Hong Kong protests continue to show, democracy has to be defended tenaciously if it is to have a secure future. It is worth remembering that a century ago, in the wake of the Great War, practically none of Europe’s major states had established the democratic governance we associate them with today. Furthermore, in several of the most important countries, whatever progress had been made was quickly erased by totalitarian ideologues, necessitating decades of political struggle before it could be restored. That is a warning from the past that we should not lightly ignore.
