Decades ago, Hugo Torres had been a guerrilla in the fight against dictator and then-Nicaraguan president Anastasio Somoza Debayle. In 1974, he had taken a group of top officials hostage, then traded them for the release of imprisoned comrades. Among them was Daniel Ortega, a Marxist bank robber who would eventually become Nicaragua’s authoritarian ruler.
Last month, amid a clampdown to obliterate nearly every hint of opposition, Ortega had his old savior arrested.
“History is on our side,” Torres said in a video he uploaded to social media. “The end of the dictatorship is close.”
Photo: AP
However, recent history is not on Torres’ side. In the past few months, the growing ranks of dictators have flexed their muscles, and freedom has been in retreat.
The list is grim: a draconian crackdown in Nicaragua, a bloody repression in Myanmar and a tightening grip by Beijing on Hong Kong.
The backsliding of democracy, though, goes back far before this year, with a long string of countries where democratic rule has been abandoned or dialed back.
Last year was “another year of decline for liberal democracy,” said a recent report from the V-Dem Institute, a Sweden-based research center. “The global decline in liberal democracy has been steep during the past 10 years.”
The late 20th and early 21st centuries saw country after country transition to democratic rule. The Soviet Union collapsed. Eastern European nations controlled by Moscow became independent. In Latin America, decades of military dictatorships gave way to elections. A wave of democratization swept Africa, from South Africa to Nigeria to Ghana.
Within just a few years, the cracks began to show.
Hard times and turmoil are mother’s milk for authoritarians. Russia’s experiment with democracy, for example, was short lived after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A plunging standard of living, a weak leader in former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, thug businesspeople and budding oligarchs fighting for control of state-owned businesses opened the way for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Then came the financial crisis of 2007-2008, which rippled around the world. In the US, banks teetered on the verge of collapse. In the EU, the US’ troubles helped lead to a debt crisis that sucked in country after country.
Those financial troubles, combined later with the political firestorms of the administration of former US president Donald Trump and angry negotiations over the UK’s exit from the EU, made liberal democracy look risky.
“The more attractive the US and Europe looks, the better that is for the folks fighting for democracy,” said Sheri Berman, a political science professor at Barnard College, Columbia University.
A 2019 Pew Research Center survey of 34 countries showed a median of 64 percent of people believe that elected officials do not care about them.
Today, a man like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban can look attractive to many voters. Orban, who returned to power in the wake of the financial crisis, feeding on an electorate that distrusted the traditional elite, spoke proudly of leading an “illiberal democracy.”
He now talks about Hungary’s “system of national cooperation,” a process that has hobbled the court system, rewritten the constitution and given immense power to himself and his party. The country’s media is largely a pro-Orban machine.
The world has a string of such leaders. There is Putin in Russia and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. There is Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.
The COVID-19 pandemic has sped up a democratic decline in Africa, analysts say, with elections postponed or opposition figures silenced from Ethiopia to Zimbabwe.
However, in a world where democracy is often swimming against the political tide, academics also see some good news. It just requires a longer view of history.
Eighty years ago, there were perhaps 12 fully functioning democracies. Today, the Economist Intelligence Unit says there are 23, and nearly half of the planet lives in some form of democracy.
Then there are the protesters, perhaps the most visible sign of a thirst for democratic rule.
Thousands of Russians flooded the streets earlier this year after opposition leader Alexei Navalny was imprisoned. Neighboring Belarus was shaken by months of protests sparked by last year’s re-election of its president, Alexander Lukashenko, which was widely seen as rigged.
Such protests regularly fail. However, political scientists say even suppressed protests can provide important political sparks. Plus, sometimes they succeed.
In Sudan, 2019 mass protests against the country’s autocratic president Omar al-Bashir led to his military ouster. In Hungary, Orban is facing a surprisingly united opposition.
Some see US President Joe Biden’s trip to Europe last month as an attempt to unite the US’ partners in a fight against authoritarianism.
Maybe that old, arrested Nicaraguan revolutionary does have reason for optimism.
“These are the desperate blows of a regime that feels itself dying,” Torres said in the video before his arrest.
Maybe. As summer wore on, he remained in prison.
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