The dramatic events in Brasília on January 8, in which Jair Bolsonaro activists tried to repeat the coup of January 6, 2021 in Washington, and to annul the election lost by the incumbent President of Brazil, are a new sign threats to democracy around the world.
The phenomenal (although losing) score of 49% obtained 10 weeks earlier by this character is also a reminder of the dramatic loss of prestige of democratic and liberal values, even if it is paradoxically expressed through voting.
As we were able to vote freely, up to almost 30%, for a pro-Stalin French Communist Party after the Second World War, we can now support almost 50% of a declared nostalgic for dictatorship and torture. , law and order as they prevailed in South America in the 1960s and 1970s.
To this worrying observation, we can oppose a counter-diagnosis based on encouraging facts: the speed and the lightning character of the response of the authorities to this attempted putsch, the rallying around Lula (the former-new president), the isolation of the disappointed and fallen facho (self-exiled in Florida a few days before) and his square of ultras, released by many right-wing formations, by most institutions, including the army.
Elsewhere in the world for several weeks, other signs of “democratic fatigue” have been appearing.
A tragic chaos seems to envelop Peru more and more, after theautogolpe missed by Pedro Castillo, on December 7. A country which, after the dictatorial decade of Alberto Fujimori (1990s), had arrived in the 21ste century to restore freedoms, to choose its leaders in credible elections and to stimulate the economic dynamism of the coastal regions… but where the political elites are cut off from the population.
There is the terrible regression of Tunisia, which has long been a great democratic hope in the Arab world, which is now sinking in turn. On December 17, the regime of President Kaïs Saïed, author of a “constitutional putsch” in the summer of 2021, organized an election… in which 11% of voters participated. Which says a lot about the credibility of the process, while economic distress seems to invalidate any talk of democracy.
In Turkey, the Constitutional Court has just blocked, in this election year, the finances of the pro-Kurdish formation HDP, the third party among the most popular in the country, which runs a serious risk of exclusion.
On this democratic deterioration, several institutions and specialized study centers, with a battery of criteria, polls and periodic surveys – Freedom House in the United Kingdom, V-Dem and IDEA institutes in Sweden, Pew Research Center in the United States United — have been sounding the alarm for a good fifteen years. According to these studies, the democratic “peak” recorded in 1989 (fall of the Berlin Wall) began to fade around 2005.
The Freedom House, for example, records in the XXIe century a continuous decline in democratic freedoms (elections, pluralism, individual freedoms, rule of law): the results for 2021 showed 25 countries “in progress”, against 60 “in regression”. In 2005, it was 83-52.
The Pew Center notes growing levels of popular distrust of the democratic system. A study by the University of Cambridge underlines the particular detachment of the younger generations.
Globalization has weakened the democratic nation-state. Some of its abilities, such as that of decisively influencing the economy, of making big plans, of keeping promises, have terribly diminished, which has caused disappointment, a feeling of futility, even the anger of the working classes. The corruption of the elites is another poison of the democratic ideal: the “affairs” that accompanied the rule of the Workers’ Party in Brazil, between 2002 and 2016, made the bed of Bolsonarism.
The decline of traditional media, their economic fragility and lack of resources, their replacement by “self-information” (or self-intoxication) through social networks, have accentuated simplistic visions and “white- Black”, “Good-Bad”. Etc., etc.
These diagnoses are known, even hackneyed. But they are painfully fair. However, the mass is not said. The regime of rights and freedoms, political liberalism, checks and balances, alternation have not said their last word.
For example, at the start of the pandemic, many pointed to the difficulties of democracies by comparing them to the “admirable” Chinese management, which seemed more efficient. Hence the perception of a democratic and Western “decadence”, which reinforced the arguments on the benefits of the authoritarian model.
Three years later, China is bogged down in its management of COVID-19, while the democracies have overtaken it: pharmaceutical success in the production of vaccines, Western solidarity, transition to the post-pandemic.
The fight of women in Iran against Islamist obscurantism, or even the war in Ukraine, can also restore the image of the democratic ideal and its bearers.
Almost all Ukrainians will tell you today that they are fighting for the existence of their nation, but also for their democracy threatened by a dictatorship. They know that, for the political systems and their respective merits, Russia-West or China-West… it is not “white hat and white hat”. Oh no.
François Brousseau is an international business analyst at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]