The country was a source of inspiration. He now inspires fear.
For the first time, the United States, emblem of democracy, made its entry Monday into the list of countries in the world where “democracy is declining”, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA).
The Stockholm, Sweden-based intergovernmental organization, which has been scrutinizing democratic developments across the world for more than 25 years, qualifies this decline as “worrying” and attributes it in large part to the years in power of Donald Trump, but also his questioning, on purpose and without any foundation, of the legitimacy of the results of the 2020 presidential election that brought Democrat Joe Biden to power.
With this addition, it is now more than a quarter of the world population who live in a country in democratic decline, specifies the International IDEA, a trend which strikes large countries like India and Brazil and now places the United States. United on a sad equal footing with Hungary, Poland and Slovenia in matters of worrying damage to democracy.
“Significantly, the United States, the bastion of global democracy, has itself been the victim of authoritarian tendencies and has descended a significant number of steps on the democratic ladder,” the report read, who speaks of a “historic turning point” when the former president, from the seat of the American executive, “undermined fundamental confidence in the electoral process”. The strategy culminated on Jan.6 with the failed coup attempt by populist supporters launched against the Capitol in order to prevent certification of the vote confirming Joe Biden’s victory.
“The visible deterioration of democracy in the United States, as evidenced by the growing tendency to challenge credible election results, efforts to suppress turnout and runaway polarization, is one of the most worrying developments regarding democracy in the United States. ‘global scale’, summarized Kevin Casas-Zamora, secretary general of the intergovernmental organization, quoted by Agence France-Presse.
Democratic decline can be the marker of a transition to a hybrid regime, then authoritarian, according to the International IDEA.
Slide towards authoritarianism
For the fifth year in a row, countries around the world whose march towards authoritarianism is underway are three times greater than those in the democratization phase. Globally, two-thirds of the population live under authoritarian, undemocratic rule. Worse, the number of countries where democracy is now in decline has doubled in almost a decade.
“The Global State of Democracy in 2021 shows that more and more countries, among established democracies, are suffering from ‘democratic erosion’, ie a decline in democratic quality,” sums up the report. The number of countries experiencing “democratic setback” – more serious and deliberate democratic erosion – has also never been higher than in the past decade. “
Notably, while the United States enters the list of declining democracies, Ukraine and North Macedonia do, due to an improved situation there, according to the report’s authors. . Serbia, Mali, Burma and Afghanistan are also changing their status to enter the list of authoritarian regimes.
Concerns about the state of health of American democracy are expressed by the International IDEA as several American states with a strong Republican concentration have for several months passed laws aimed at reducing access to the ballot box, but also at facilitating the overthrow of the ballot box. ‘an election by electoral bodies whose independence is increasingly eroded. These legislative changes are justified by repeated claims that an “electoral theft” was committed in 2020, even though these claims are in clear contradiction to the facts.
Last July, a panel of American historians also ranked Donald Trump among the worst presidents in the country’s history, since 1789. His attempted coup, as well as his defiant management of the pandemic, have earned this status which has accompanied the democratic decline in the country that has just been confirmed by the International IDEA.