Democracy fought against the darkness this year, but challenges remain

2022 started off with the most devastating blow to the liberal international order since World War II: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brazen invasion of neighboring Ukraine, a sovereign democratic state. Despite the many horrors of that war, the year is ending with Putin’s utter humiliation by Ukrainian forces.

Led by its heroic president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s dedication to preserving “the flame of liberty” — as US President Joe Biden described the bloody struggle — has all but ensured Putin’s marginalisation and, very probably, his future irrelevance in world affairs. Putin’s Ukraine debacle is shaping up to be the worst defeat for imperial Russia — and today’s Russia must be called that — since Tsar Nicholas II saw his navy destroyed by a newly rising Japan in 1905.

That’s hardly the only good news this year for democracy, which has made something of a comeback after a decade in which authoritarianism and populist xenophobia were rising around the world and many leading democracies seemed to be badly malfunctioning. Those menacing trends persist, but liberal democratic values have managed to reassert themselves on a number of other fronts.

In April, French President Emmanuel Macron trounced his right-wing opponent Marine Le Pen. In Germany, the centrist government has held firm and in December foiled a coup attempt, arresting 25 right-wing extremists on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. And in Brazil’s widely watched presidential election, left-leaning Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated incumbent Jair Bolsonaro — whose racist, quasi-fascistic rhetoric earned him the nickname “Trump of the Tropics.”

As for Donald Trump himself, he and his MAGA movement are now in deep trouble. The former US president — whose incitement of the January 6 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol threatened the foundations of American democracy — found himself and his virulent populist message dramatically rejected in November’s midterm elections. Exit polls showed that for many voters, Trump-engendered fears about the viability of democracy were a key issue, helping to propel what was expected to be a Republican rout into a much closer contest in which most of Trump’s handpicked candidates were beaten.

During his political rise six years ago, Trump boasted, “We’re going to win so much, you’re going to get tired of winning”. But Trump and the candidates he has endorsed have now lost three elections in a row, in 2018, 2020, and 2022. For the first time since 2015, leading Republicans believe there is a fair prospect that Trump is losing control of the party as well, especially since his company has been convicted of criminal tax fraud and falsifying records, and an indictment of the former president himself is soon expected.

There were other hopeful signs that new green shoots of democratic activism are springing up in two of the world’s most repressive states. In China, Xi Jinping’s draconian zero-COVID policies and recentralisation of the economy touched off the most serious protests since 1989. And Iran’s Islamic Republic found itself unable to completely squelch secular democratic protests that began in September, even going so far as to execute demonstrators.

Many of these events pointed anew to the weaknesses inherent in autocracy and dictatorships. This is occurring on the world’s biggest stages, said philosopher Francis Fukuyama, who became famous three decades ago for predicting the “end of history” — that with the collapse of communism, the way was clear for the worldwide spread of liberal democracy and Western-style capitalism.

Last year, just after the January 6 insurrection when Trumpism seemed to be raging out of control, Fukuyama seemed unsure about which political systems would triumph in the long run. In an interview with me, Fukuyama suggested that rather than the ultimate triumph of democracy he had once anticipated, the so-called end of history instead might be a “perpetual recycling” of authoritarianism and democracy.

More recently, however, Fukuyama has expressed fresh confidence that liberal democracies are destined to overcome autocracies. This is partly because, in the past year, the classic pitfalls of dictatorship have been made clearer in the two nations that together pose the biggest threat to the liberal international order, China and Russia.

Surrounded by Kremlin yes-men, Putin clearly didn’t understand how seriously Ukraine might resist his invasion or how fiercely the West would respond. In the last few years, Xi has become as powerful an autocrat as Putin is — indeed, the most dominant dictator in China since Mao Zedong — and as a result he may be making bad decisions because fewer people dare to naysay him, Fukuyama said

In frank conversation with Biden, according to the US president, Xi argued that “one-man rule” would prevail over democracy in the 21st century because in the face of fast-paced change “democracies require consensus, and it’s hard to get consensus, therefore they can’t keep up with an autocracy”. But the fallacies of one-man rule could be blowing up in Xi’s face: He may not have been made aware of how seriously he was harming China’s prospects with his zero-COVID policies, which led to the current protests, and his Maoist recentralisation of China’s once surging but now sagging economy. It was striking — and highly unusual — that as the demonstrations raged Xi and the Chinese government swiftly eased the COVID-19 restrictions.

“Xi is going to survive easily in the short run,” Fukuyama said in an email. “But the Chinese economy is in really bad shape — a lot of the economists here think they have negative growth now, and there’s no real fix for either that or for getting out of COVID.”

Another positive sign emerging from the street protests in China and Iran is that “people are pushing back on autocratic regimes and realise that these regimes are not quite as strong and impenetrable as they were given credit for”, said Nicole Bibbins Sedaca of Freedom House, a nonprofit think tank that tracks the status of democracy, political freedom, and human rights worldwide.

To be sure, these are only countervailing winds to a trend long building against democracy, and experts caution how precarious it remains. The odds are still that the protests in China and Iran will be suppressed. Le Pen may have lost to Macron, but she still got far more votes than any far-right candidate in modern French history, and her party won a record number of seats in the Parliament in legislative elections in June. Right-wing politicians are still in power elsewhere or taking control, as seen in Italy with the rise of Giorgia Meloni, the far-right leader who was sworn in as Italy’s first female prime minister in October. India, too, continues toward “authoritarian drift”, said Larry Diamond, a democracy expert at Stanford University.

And while there is new hope that Trumpist populism may be losing steam in the United States, it’s also important to note that hundreds of races in the midterms were decided by only a handful of votes, demonstrating again how polarised US democracy remains. Those deep divisions were exposed yet again mid-December, when Senator Kyrsten Sinema announced she was departing the Democratic Party, potentially leaving the Senate equally divided once again.

“The fever has broken, but the virus is still in the body,” Diamond said. “The struggle between democracy and authoritarian trends is going to be a fluid and very messy situation for a long time to come.”

Bibbins Sedaca agreed that the United States is facing “very, very serious polarisation”. But she added that “in the midterms we didn’t see that manifesting in an attack on our system. The process worked. There was no violence, no questioning the process.” Indeed, many Republicans now argue that what is mainly costing Trump support among voters today is his continued obsession with the false claim that he won the 2020 election. In the midterms, just about every major Trump-endorsed candidate not only lost but, in contrast to Trump in 2020, conceded the race as well. Only one losing Trumpist — Kari Lake, a gubernatorial candidate in Arizona — challenged the legitimacy of the voting.

Viewed globally, the odds still seemed stacked against democracy. According to Freedom House, only 20% of the world’s population lives in free countries, the rest in nations that are considered either not free or partly free. A report by the Sweden-based V-Dem Institute released this year was even more grim, finding that liberal democracies exist in only 34 nations, down from 42 in 2012, which are home to only 13% of the world population, and that dictatorships now “harbour 70% of the world population — 5.4 billion people”. The report concluded that just about all the global advances for democracy since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 have been “eradicated”.

“The big global trend lines are worrying, and that’s because that progressive arc of history has bent backwards and on a global basis we’re seeing the world becoming less, not more, democratic,” said Charles Kupchan, a Georgetown University political scientist.

While Biden can claim that his warnings about the dangers to US democracy helped influence the midterms, in a global context his pro-democracy campaign is also meeting stiff headwinds. So much so that the US president in recent months, before the midterms, subtly reframed his approach to winning worldwide support for Ukraine; whereas previously Biden had portrayed the stakes as a battle between democracy and autocracy, he now began to characterise it as a broader strategic struggle to defend the norms of the international system, namely territorial integrity.

That shift began with Biden’s September speech to the United Nations General Assembly, when he noted that the UN charter “was not only signed by democracies of the world. It was negotiated among citizens of dozens of nations with vastly different histories and ideologies, united in their commitment to work for peace”. A month later, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Washington “will work with any nation prepared to stand up for the values of the UN charter.” Biden’s new National Security Strategy also invoked the threat to territorial norms, noting that “[m]any non-democracies join the world’s democracies in forswearing these behaviours.”

Even so, Bibbins Sedaca argued that in the United States and elsewhere, there is a new fervour for defending democracy where it is being challenged and a new hope that autocratic regimes “are not an iron fortress that can’t be challenged, that they are not as powerful as we thought”. Worldwide, she said, “we see a pitched battle between democratic forces and autocratic forces, and people are stepping into that space”.

The struggle in Ukraine started the trend by “awakening an awareness of what’s at stake — of how fragile democracy can be with unrestrained authoritarianism”, she said. “The positive part is that people are realising this is not just a side issue but a central existential one.”

And the mere potential that Trump and his brand of virulent xenophobia and ally-bashing might be passing gives the United States somewhat more credibility abroad. “I would say that the high blood pressure in Europe has come down a bit, but everyone is still asking who will be the next president,” Kupchan said. “The big picture here in the United States is that our political centre has been largely depopulated. Until it’s rebuilt, we will be swinging from left to right and prone to changes in power that have a big impact on foreign policy.”

Thus, the struggle will continue well into 2023 and beyond, but for the first time in a decade or more, democracy appeared to be making a comeback around the world.