There is plenty to worry about in the global contest between democracy and autocracy. Iran’s violent repression of antigovernment protests in January crushed the latest effort to challenge a ruthless regime. In many European countries, including Britain, Germany and France, far-right parties seem ascendant. And Donald Trump is doing what he can to undermine democracy in the United States.
Yet a closer analysis shows that autocrats are often running scared of their people. And surprisingly, democracy these days seems sometimes to be held in higher esteem in the global south than in the democratic heartland of the west.
These trends show there is nothing inevitable about autocracy’s rise – that the defenders of democracy are on the right side of history and should keep fighting. This is no time for fatalistic despair.
In the west, a disturbing number of people have begun to support politicians who disdain democracy. These people are often members of a country’s ethnic majority working class who are struggling, facing economic stagnation amid growing inequality. They feel that government officials do not serve, listen to or respect them. Out of frustration, they increasingly embrace the anti-democratic far right. That the far right offers little practical assistance, and often works against their economic interests, has not been an obstacle. They are attracted to its attacks on governing elites and convenient scapegoating of immigrants and other minorities.
To recapture these alienated voters, pro-democracy parties must do a better job of making them feel genuinely heard and respected – of showing a real commitment to serving their interests. That will probably require rejecting limitless free trade and globalization, better delivering social services, and meaningfully addressing the problem of affordability. It will also involve a rhetorical shift away from progressives’ identitarian tendency to speak in terms of a collection of narrow interest groups rather than appeals that encompass everyone. And it will demand taking on the moneyed interests that profit from the status quo and are willing to spend big to defend it.
This is not a simple project, but it is doable. That the stakes are the continued viability of democracy should spur political leaders to take the needed steps.
By contrast, when one looks at the global south, what is striking is the broad popular embrace of democracy. While some people in the west who have lived their entire lives under democracy seem willing to forsake it, many in the global south who have experienced life under autocracy want out.
In country after country in recent years, large numbers of people have periodically taken to the streets to protest against autocracy and in favor of democracy, often at risk of detention and even death. We have seen such uprisings from Hong Kong to Nicaragua, from Russia to Uganda.
Sometimes these pro-democracy movements prevail. They ousted the autocratic prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, and the Rajapaksa dynasty in Sri Lanka. They voted out Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil and the Law and Justice party prime minister in Poland. They stymied a presidential self-coup attempt in South Korea.
Yet other times, autocratic forces are sufficiently brutal that they crush the pro-democracy movement – at least for a time. That is what happened most recently in Iran. It is also what the authorities have done in Russia, Belarus, Cuba, Nicaragua, Hong Kong and Uganda.
But it can be scary for a leader to survive by the barrel of a gun. Most autocrats try to secure at least a degree of popular acquiescence to their rule. But if all they have going for them is repression, few will come to their defense should they face a serious challenge, as Syria’s Bashar al-Assad discovered when a rebel force walked into Damascus virtually unopposed and ousted him. That is why Russia’s Vladimir Putin has nightmares about color revolutions – and why he initially invaded Ukraine in 2014 after the Ukrainian people overthrew a Kremlin-aligned president.
Some autocrats have tried more subtle methods of control, allowing elections but trying to tilt the playing field in their favor by controlling the media, civil society and political parties. But that is also a dangerous game, because pro-democracy forces can win even unfair elections, as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is likely to discover in April, or Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko learned in 2020.
When instead autocrats fall back on repression, as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has done by imprisoning his principal opponent, Istanbul’s mayor, Ekram İmamoğlu, or Putin’s Russia did by arresting and ultimately killing the charismatic Alexei Navalny, as European intelligence agencies found, they are left with Zombie elections. That ensures a favorable result but conveys none of the legitimacy that was the point of the electoral charade.
Autocracy remains unpopular because unaccountable governments invariably serve themselves rather than their people. For example, Orbán spends major European Union subsides on building soccer stadiums to enrich his backers while basic social services such as hospitals are left decrepit. Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is spending huge sums on a vanity project – a new administrative capital – as a vehicle to pay off his military supporters while ordinary Egyptians struggle to afford bread.
China was supposed to be the exception. It has indeed lifted hundreds of millions from poverty, albeit starting from the low base of the devastation caused by the Chinese Communist party’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. But its slowing economy owes much to that same dictatorship – the demographic echo of the one-child policy, a bloated real-estate sector mired in debt, inadequate consumer spending because a historically poorly funded social safety net requires people to save excessively, and the quashing of companies that become too successful for fear they will challenge CCP power.
The inadequacy of CCP rule becomes apparent when compared with China’s more democratic neighbors. China has yet to escape the middle-income trap; few autocracies other than oil-rich kingdoms have managed that. Yet its democratic neighbors – Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, even Hong Kong before Beijing’s crushing of its freedoms – have flourished. That is why hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Hong Kong in 2019-2020 to protest against the dictatorship of the CCP, which led Xi Jinping to revoke Hong Kong’s freedoms.
The best case for autocracy has long been Singapore, which has managed to avoid the corruption that impoverishes autocracies from Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela to Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. But there are limits to the lessons to be drawn from a small city state. The fact remains: if one could choose the governing system of the country where one would live, one would be unlikely to choose an autocracy. Democracies have their faults, but those pale in comparison to the alternatives.
Yes, western democracies are facing a difficult era. Work is needed to reinforce their legitimacy at home by ensuring that they serve all members of their societies. But we should not despair at the Trumps of the western world. As the global south shows, people want governments that answer to them. They want governments they are able to influence with free media, an unimpeded civil society, competitive political parties, and peaceful protests. In short, they want democracy. We all should.
Kenneth Roth is a Guardian US columnist, visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, and former executive director of Human Rights Watch. He is the author of Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments
