Elections are being held this year in as many as 60 countries, including seven of the world’s 10 most populous. They will test the ability of democracies to defend their values, especially with the increasing influence of extremist and populist parties and the politicians who lead them.
But as democracy tries to defend itself, it faces the challenge of doing so while adhering to its own values. Prime among them must be its central tenet: the right of every citizen to vote and to have a voice. The rise of the far right would suggest that liberal democrats should be careful not to patronize those who disagree with them, analysts say, let alone consider them, in Hillary Clinton’s exasperated words eight years ago, a “basket of deplorables.”
There are numerous reasons for more widespread disaffection with liberal democracy and its performance, analysts say, many of them stemming from slow economic growth, unemployment from automation and globalization, and anxieties over migration and ethnicity — all of which challenge traditional ideas of identity and national character.
It is often stoked by politicians making false claims and playing off popular prejudices.
Prime among the major threats to democracy now, the analysts suggest, is “democratic backsliding” — the tendency for existing democracies to slip backward toward more authoritarianism. Leaders often elected in the name of reform can use existing powers to weaken democratic institutions and checks and balances, including the independence of the judiciary and of the media, to try to preserve power for themselves and their parties in future elections, which may be less free and fair.
Examples, the analysts say, can be found in Hungary, Slovakia, Turkey, Mexico, the United States and India, too — established democracies that have already slid backward or are veering in that direction, in what is sometimes called “democratic deconsolidation.”
“You cannot take as a fact that an established democracy will always remain one,” said Shashi Tharoor, a member of the Indian Parliament and a former under secretary general of the United Nations, who is scheduled to be one of the speakers at the Athens Democracy Forum in Greece this week in association with The New York Times. (The event, first convened in 2013, explores the challenges to democracy through panels and interviews with scores of experts on the subject from around the world.)
“Elections can be mostly free and fair, but once a government is elected there is no obligation to respect the time-honored conventions that make democracy democracy,” Mr. Tharoor said in a phone interview. Key among them? Legal fairness, the autonomy of institutions, the integrity and independence of the central bank and electoral commission, and the independence of the media and the judiciary.
“Democracy is a process, depending on how governments and voters conduct themselves between elections,” he said. “That’s where the changes are.”
The threats are both external and internal, said Arancha González Laya, dean of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po and formerly foreign affairs minister of Spain.
“Democracy is backsliding, and it’s one of the most serious issues we face,” she said in an interview at the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy. “When democracy backslides it becomes more difficult to make decisions on security, migration and ways to improve our economies.”
The threat from outside comes from foreign interference, she said, amplified by disinformation, lately enhanced by artificial intelligence, to confuse voters and undermine the integrity of democratic choice. Russia and China have been regularly accused by the United States and European countries of trying to influence elections to degrade democratic integrity, damage alliances and create divisions within society.
“As they did during Covid, they also push this idea that autocracies are more efficient and question the ability of democracies to deliver for our citizens,” she said.
The enemies of democracy from within are the self-styled “illiberal democracies,” like Hungary, and “the political leaders and parties that work to remove checks and balances, weaken democratic institutions and concentrate media power to degrade the quality of democracy from within,” she said.
And often they try to do so in the name of efficiency and even democracy itself, she said, “supposedly cutting red tape or keeping ‘unelected technocrats’ from making political decisions.”
A recent example, she said, has been the effort by the departing Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and his party to pass a law shifting the judiciary from an appointment-based system largely grounded in training and qualifications to one where voters elect judges but there are few requirements to running. The result would be the removal of 7,000 judges from their jobs, from the chief justice of the Supreme Court down to those at local courts.
The enemy inside is also using the same tools and technology for disinformation, Ms. González said, diminishing voters’ ability to discern when they are being fed a lie. “It’s getting harder,” she said. “The line between truth and falsehood is getting more and more porous.”
Many suggest that the cause of backsliding is democracy’s failure to deliver to voters, or globalization, or increased economic inequality. “But the data don’t really bear that out,” said Laura Thornton, senior director for global democracy programs at the McCain Institute, based in Washington, D.C., and part of the University of Arizona. “I fall into the camp of cleavages in culture and values, the way people see their country and their identity changing,” which is dividing societies into those who favor multiculturism and diversity, and those who want to return “to the old hierarchies” of race, ethnicity, gender and religion, she said, “who often see women and minorities as being in their way.”
During the recent elections in the states of Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg in Germany, the far-right extremist Alternative for Germany, AfD, which came in first in Thuringia and a narrow second in the others, had a poster: “Heimat statt Multikulti” — roughly, “homeland instead of multiculturism.”
Democratic backsliding is threatening established democracies in the West, but it has taken place mostly in the so-called Global South and among developing democracies, argued Thomas Carothers, who has studied comparative democratization at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
It is important to distinguish between democratic backsliding and authoritarian hardening, he said in an interview, where countries that have never been very democratic become less so, like Russia, Venezuela, Cambodia, Iran and Belarus.
“Actually in established democracies not very much backsliding has happened,” Mr. Carothers said. Hungary is the worst case, followed by Poland, “but Poland has come through it” with the election in 2023 of Donald Tusk as prime minister, whose centrist alliance defeated the government led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, which had worked to control the judiciary and the media. Bangladesh, too, has just expelled its longtime leader turned autocrat, Sheikh Hasina, with an outcome still unclear.
But backsliding has been most obvious in places like India, Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia and Egypt, Mr. Carothers said. Serbia is questionable, as is Israel, especially if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu succeeds in his effort to undercut the independence of the judiciary and make it subject to Parliament. “In Israel, is it serious tremors or backsliding?” he asked.
As in Israel, numerous Western democracies have had “tremors,” like the United States, France, Britain and Germany, “shaken by the far right, by citizen alienation and tired elites, and political parties that have run out of ideas and energy,” he said. But so far most democratic checks and balances have held.
Mr. Carothers, too, believes that blaming inequality or poor economic growth is unconvincing. “The problem is more that a lot of countries came to democracy late, in the 1990s. Their institutions are weak, and they elect predatory, entrepreneurial leaders who consolidate more power in office, and it’s hard to stop them,” he said.
Values and identity are important too. “A lot of Europeans are unsettled by high levels of immigration and economic stagnation, and Europeans can feel threatened by a world it wants to keep out.” But that’s a problem of citizens, “not necessarily backsliding,” Mr. Carothers said, even if it can feed the parties that want to undermine the current democratic system.
And one must be careful not to take a particular European problem and argue that it’s a global trend of populism or the far right, he cautioned. In India, for example, it’s difficult to put Prime Minister Narendra Modi on a traditional left-wing or right-wing spectrum. Similarly in Tunisia, or even Germany, where the AfD and a similar party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, combine nationalism with socialism.
“It’s the erosion of democracy from within that now poses the gravest threat,” wrote Ivo Daalder, a Dutch-born former American ambassador to NATO and president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, in an essay describing his choice to become American. The victory of authoritarian leaders “is made possible by the steady erosion of the norms, rules and basic rights that are the foundation of democracy,” he said.
Mr. Daalder warned about the aims of former President Donald J. Trump, now the Republican Party presidential nominee, including stated promises to “demolish the deep state,” “throw off the sick political class that hates our country” and “rout the fake-news media.”
Project 2025, a blueprint for a Trump presidential transition prepared by the conservative Heritage Foundation, describes the way it might be done. Mr. Trump has distanced himself from the document, but both he and his vice-presidential choice, JD Vance, have endorsed many of its aims, which focus on strengthening executive control over the government. Mr. Trump has told his followers to get out the vote for him, “just this time.” Because once back in power, “it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore.”
Mr. Trump has denied that he intends to remain in office no matter what and has said that his remarks were aimed at his audience of Christians, “who vote in very small percentages,” to assure them they would never need to vote again once he is elected and sorts out the country. He has argued that he is trying to preserve American democracy from his opponents, whom he has variously described as both fascist and communist.
Ms. González of Sciences Po said that weakening democracy from within, by those who understand their country and its politics, is hard to confront. “That’s why the choice Americans are making in November is so important,” she said. “Because the champion of this weakening is Donald Trump, who admires the European champion, Viktor Orban. But it’s a big echo chamber, and all of them associate themselves with Mr. Trump,” including Mr. Netanyahu.
“It’s not all Trump’s fault, of course,” she said. “But he gives a lot of oxygen to those in Europe who want to weaken democracy.”
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