Election booby traps. Rotten democracy. “Democrassouille”…
These slogans and neologisms that smack of the extreme left or the extreme right abound on social networks. They even appear in some commentators.
We want to make believe – we manage to make believe – that literally, it’s white hat and white hat between the imperfect and wavering Western democracies, which give birth to a Donald Trump (actually mortal danger)… and the autocrats, semi-democrats and outspoken dictators, including the Freedom House and other V-Dem Institutes (patented specialists in measuring the democratic qualities of states) have been telling us for twenty years that they have the wind in their sails.
This is the other part, less explicit but linked, of the criticism of those for whom Westerners are the real warmongers in Ukraine.
Namely that the Ukrainians, who say they are fighting for peace, for their violated sovereignty, but also for freedom and for their right to elect whoever they want, therefore for democracy… are only the poor victims of counterfeiters who manipulate and do not care about their freedom.
Our despisers of voracious capitalism and its artificial democracy, of “the toy Ukraine and cannon fodder of the imperialists”, defenders of the thesis of “encirclement by NATO” and other “Zelensky, remote-controlled pawn”… tell the background that between Putin and Biden, neither is really preferable.
Geopolitical paranoia joins here the criticism of the system itself, internally. Criticism in the form of a disdainful pout, even an insult.
Which brings us to Turkey. Turkey, whose president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, played his re-election yesterday and was announced at the top of the first round on Sunday, with a slim lead over his opponent, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu. President whose same Freedom House, in 2003, wrote that Turkey, where he had just taken power, represented “a hope of democracy in a Muslim context”…
This perception gave wings, for a while, to the geopolitical ambitions of a country which, failing to join Europe, saw itself as a model for the Middle East and Central Asia.
This same character features prominently in the list of great autocrats of 2023. A very broad continuum that goes from right-wing nationalist India (where Christians and Muslims are flouted while condemning, for a crime of speech, a leader of opposition named Gandhi) to the purest dictatorships (China, North Korea, Eritrea), passing through small emulators who are not far from it (Ortega in Nicaragua, revolutionary driven out by the ballot box, then returned as a ruthless dictator) .
Here is a country, Turkey, where the voting procedures have not been completely perverted by the repeated attacks on the freedoms which, beyond the free vote, make democracy.
Turkey is one of those countries (the word “democracy” has been used to designate them) where the general conditions have seriously deteriorated: full powers to the president after the 2017 referendum, Parliament whose majority is on the finger and on the eye, government crony judges who shut down newspapers and imprison thousands of opponents (the leader of the pro-Kurdish party has been in prison for years)…
But a country where, on the day of the vote, the procedures remain fairly transparent, without direct electoral fraud.
There was Iran where, at a certain time, the presidential election was not a pure farce (despite the reduced powers of the elected representative). And the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez where, in the 2000s and until 2013, with electronic media, state institutions, justice, etc., all under the orders of power… Chávez said all the same: “We must scrupulously votes on election day. »
To the point that Fidel Castro, annoyed, had said to him one day: “But what is this business of free elections? Your legitimacy is revolutionary! “Thereafter, under Nicolás Maduro, these beautiful nuances were lost…
In Turkey, the degradation process is not complete… and may still be reversible. This is a central issue of this election: save democracy, turn the tide. This is also what the heroic Ukrainians are trying, with other means and in a completely different context.
François Brousseau is an international affairs columnist at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]