Between global warming, the return of inflation and hunger, the war in Ukraine which awakens the nuclear threat and a coronavirus which has not said its last word, another evil threatens the world: the decline of democracy and faith in a system based on the rule of law, free expression, the sovereign choice of leaders.
This decline is regularly observed, with strong criteria, by respected organizations such as the V-Dem Institute of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, with its fascinating annual report.
By many measures, the number of human beings living under the rule of law and freedoms has steadily declined since the beginning of the 21st century.e century, after having represented, in a natural and consensual way, the majority, but also a desired “future of the world”, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
More recently, there has been the rise of a regime like China, which no longer pretends to play the democratic game and openly proposes an “anti-model”…
There is also, at the heart of the democratic world, the problem of the decline — in Europe, in the Americas — of popular support for this system long associated with peace and prosperity. A system often exported, with both political and economic success: just look at the extraordinary progress of Eastern Europe in the 1990s and 2000s, or of certain Asian countries.
(Of course, there are notable exceptions to the correspondence between democracy and economic growth; on the other hand, “exporting” democracy works much less well when attempted. manu militari.)
The United States and Brazil are among those countries which, having lived, loved and defended democracy – for a few centuries for the first, a few decades for the second – have seen democratic disenchantment develop in recent years.
Admittedly, in Italy or in Sweden, we have just witnessed the seizure of power by distant ideological descendants of Nazism and fascism (direct seizure in Italy, indirect in Sweden – with in the latter case, a “support without participation” of the party in question), but with scrupulous respect for the democratic rules in force — and by validating them.
With the two giants of the Americas, it is quite different.
In these two cases, it is the system itself, its procedures, its pillars such as elections and the separation of powers (the judiciary, the courts), which are actively contested, undermined from within, in a methodical work of undermining.
This threat to the democratic order, this political project are not detailed in the catalog of a party. But they are gradually formulated, and end up coming together, by adding the statements of the leaders Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro.
Their desires, their watchwords, their implicit or explicit threats, the systematic recourse to insult to speak of adversaries and rivals end up defining a program, an aspiration, a method, which one can qualify as fascistic.
The assemblies around the chief are sometimes physically dangerous places for anyone who dares to think otherwise and manifest it, for a “foreign body”… like the journalist who has come to do a report.
The “cult of the leader”, the denigration of the electoral system (which will only be legitimate if it assures you of victory), the encouraged proliferation of firearms (common in Brazil and the United States), the call for a revolutionary action in the street (January 6, 2021), statements like “It’s a merciless struggle between Good and Evil” (Bolsonaro, before the presidential election) or even “Don’t forget, I’m a stable genius (Trump, again last Thursday)…all these signs are converging.
However, has this fascistic aspiration, based on a real mass movement (49% for Bolsonaro on October 30, 47% for Trump in 2020), won? Absolutely not, mass is not said. The presidential election in Brazil and the midterm elections in the United States have shown, on the contrary, that the antibodies exist, that the resistance is there.
Bolsonaro took only two days to get out of his sulk and let himself be convinced by his entourage, to the chagrin of his supporters who wanted to play again on January 6 “Brazilian style”, that he had to give up adventurism. That the army was not on board… and that the fallen president’s friends will be well represented in Congress. A victory, aware of the admirable Brazilian electoral system.
In the United States, half of the population, worried about democracy, rushed to the polls to preserve the Democratic majority in the Senate, and greatly limit that of the Republicans in the House.
But it’s not just that “the good guys” won here, and “the bad guys” lost. In the main states (Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, etc.) where Donald Trump had tried to reverse his defeat in 2020, voters rejected the candidates – in particular for the crucial posts of Secretary of State – who could then have rigged or hijacked the elections in these states.
In Brazil and the United States in November 2022, the trend of democratic backsliding has stalled. But the war is not over.
François Brousseau is an international business analyst at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]