(Washington) Joe Biden has made promoting democracy around the world a priority. But since arriving at the White House, she has mostly suffered setbacks in countries where the United States had placed high hopes.
“We are seeing an increase in attacks on democracy, rather than a growing demand for democracy,” said Derek Mitchell, president of the National Democratic Institute, which defends this system of government on the international stage.
“It is impossible to prevent soldiers with weapons from deciding that they will be better than others. Old habits die hard, especially in armies whose leaders have difficulty renouncing power and privileges, ”adds the man who was the first United States ambassador to Burma at the start of a democratic transition fervently supported by Washington, ten years ago.
It is precisely in this country that the President of the United States suffered his first hard blow. Just twelve days after his inauguration, the army overthrew and arrested the 1er February, Aung San Suu Kyi, long considered an icon of democracy.
Since then, two other countries have dampened the enthusiasm aroused by their revolutions supposed to turn the page on dark dictatorships: Tunisia, cradle of the “Arab Spring” in the early 2010s, whose president took full powers; and, since Monday, Sudan, where the military overthrew the civilian government just three hours after the departure of an American envoy who came to try to reconcile them.
“Summit for Democracy”
Military juntas have also seized power in Guinea, Mali and Chad, while in Afghanistan, the Taliban, sworn enemies of the United States, have become the new masters of Kabul thanks to the withdrawal of American forces and the collapse of the government that Washington had supported with billions for twenty years.
US diplomacy spokesman Ned Price acknowledged “setbacks in some countries,” but pledged that America would continue to “lead the democratic struggle.”
This is the subject of a virtual summit “for democracy” organized on December 9 and 10 by Joe Biden.
For him, it is a question of demonstrating that democracies can win the battle for values and efficiency against “autocracies”, with China in the lead.
For the Democrat, this fight is also a way of marking the break with his Republican predecessor Donald Trump, who had not hesitated to flirt with authoritarian leaders and continues to question, without proof, his defeat in the presidential election of 2020.
Except for Afghanistan, where the American withdrawal, confirmed by Joe Biden, played a role, the ills of democracies are not directly blamed on the President of the United States.
“It takes decades to consolidate a democracy, and years to erode it. So I don’t think any government can really do much concrete in its first nine months, ”said Frances Brown, who worked on these issues in the White House when Barack Obama was president.
“Not up to the task”
Especially since the Biden administration reacted very quickly to the coups d’état in Burma and Sudan, by cutting American aid – “it does not solve everything as if by magic, but it matters”, because “it shows that America is not indifferent, ”she says.
The US president has also distanced himself from allies, even if human rights defenders deplore their timidity: he has stopped arms sales to Saudi Arabia and made part of the aid to Egypt conditional on compliance. rule of law.
According to an index of the British weekly The Economist, the overall state of democracy in 2020 was at its lowest since the start of this survey in 2006, due to the proliferation of putschs, but also to the rise of populism.
Jonathan Powell, of the University of Central Florida, sees the economic difficulties exacerbated by the pandemic as one of the common reasons for this deterioration.
“When countries are already confronted with a very precarious balance between authoritarianism and the maintenance of a certain democratic stability, any systemic shock” can “really have important consequences”, he analyzes.
Another possible factor is the emergence of China as a power capable of supporting regimes on which the West would turn its back.
All the more so as the image of the American model is itself tarnished by the extreme divisions of its political class which slow down any reformist impetus and the outbreak of violence, like the attack by demonstrators against Congress, the January 6, to challenge the results of the presidential election.
“Those who fight for their own democratic rights will surely not give up just because the United States is not up to the task,” said ex-Ambassador Derek Mitchell. “But it would be better for the United States to demonstrate the effectiveness of a democracy. ”