Two countries in the Americas are currently witnessing a battle for democracy. A democracy that it is commonplace today to declare moribund or outdated, at a time when the second quarter of the 21st century is about to begin.e century and where autocracies like Russia, China and Iran are mobilizing, even uniting, to undermine the rule of law, political liberalism, individual freedom, alternation in power… and the blunted prestige of the West which claims to represent all of this.
And in these two countries, it is electoral events, their probity, their capacity to generate interest, support and legitimacy, which remain at the heart of the struggle.
In the United States, a crazy summer has seen a succession of upheavals in a few weeks that would easily fill the calendar of a whole year.
A disastrous televised debate (which can in retrospect be considered a real blessing for the Democratic Party), the sudden withdrawal from the race of a sitting president suspected of senility, preceded by an assassination attempt on his opponent. Then, the meteoric rise of a self-effacing (and uncertainly competent) vice president, transformed overnight into the uncontested super-candidate for the presidency, completed the political upheaval.
Why has Joe Biden’s (undeniable) cognitive decline been scrutinized by a merciless media, with medical commentary to back it up, while Donald Trump’s inconsistencies, litanies, digressions and delusional fixations have not been subjected to the same media regime?
On this register, even media known to be liberal (or even “woke”), such as the New York Times or the Washington Postfavorable to the Democrats, have not done their job. It would have been necessary to highlight, as was done for Biden (despite the attempts at cover-up by the presidential entourage), Donald Trump’s mental illness… and his serious cognitive decline.
The sudden replacement, in 72 hours, of a slow and somber Joe Biden by a radiant and prancing Kamala Harris was seen by some (Trump himself, but also Maureen Dowd, famous commentator on the New York Times) as a “putsch” within the Democratic Party.
Perhaps, but this replacement is also a sign that this formation remains a living organism, well named, with tendencies, capable of reacting and changing direction according to external stimuli.
Harris’s emergence, whatever one may have thought of the character, has relaunched American democracy. Interest in the race has increased tenfold; there has been a surge in online grassroots funding: small donations have exploded, representing nearly half of the Democratic Party’s election budget.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party, even sitting on an (incredible) base of support in the 45%, with a map and an electoral system that favors it, has frozen in programmatic nihilism, the disappearance of internal trends, vengeful obsession and abandonment to a fascistic authoritarian capo.
Donald Trump, disoriented by the upheavals of the summer, is no longer finding his bearings and is rambling more than ever, continuing to pronounce the word “Biden” much more often than the word “Harris”.
Democracy is at stake this fall in the United States, but the prognosis is less bleak in August than it was in June.
In Venezuela, the situation is different. The dictatorial tendency of the regime of Nicolas Maduro, successor in 2013 to Hugo Chavez, himself in power for more than 14 years (1998-2013), was known. It had been confirmed and strengthened during the 2010s and the early 2020s.
But the “Bolivarian” regime of Venezuela, actively supported by China and Russia, differs from the latter. Despite an institutional context hostile to pluralism and the division of powers, the electoral mechanism is not completely discredited there – while there are no elections in China and those in Russia are nothing more than a sham.
The proof is that the opposition, in this summer of 2024, agreed to play the game, believing – rightly, as we can see in retrospect – that it could get something out of the exercise.
Hugo Chavez himself, who was at the head of a regime that, on the eve of his disappearance, had completely taken over the electronic media and the justice system, insisted that on the day of the vote, a real electoral commission would really count the votes. A shaky democracy, with all the dice loaded in favor of the regime up front… but still: Chavez regularly went to get more than 50% of the support at the bottom of the ballot boxes.
Which had also earned him reproaches from the friendly regime of Cuba. Fidel Castro is said to have said one day to Chavez something like: “But what is this story about free elections? What do you do if one day you lose? Your legitimacy is revolutionary! It should not depend on the result of bourgeois elections!”
The whole contradiction is there. And the Venezuelan opposition, extraordinarily mobilized in this summer of 2024, has been able to take advantage of the remaining democracy in the system, with the feat of gathering the real minutes at the local level. Added together, they prove beyond any doubt that the opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, obtained approximately twice as many votes as the outgoing president.
The Venezuelan dictatorship is now naked. It is not clear whether a solution — other than tyranny and repression, with, for example, an exit door for the Maduro regime — is still possible. Countries governed by the left, such as Brazil, Chile and Colombia, are currently working on it. But this episode undeniably represents a victory, even if imperfect and incomplete, for the democratic idea, its prestige and its relevance in 2024.
François Brousseau is an international news columnist at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]