Opinion

Democracy under siege: something is happening globally

photo_camera brasil-asalto-bolsonaro

Today it is Brazil, two years ago it was the Capitol in the United States. Tomorrow it could be any democracy, it doesn't matter if it is more or less consolidated, there is a germ sprouting in the heat of social networks and incubated by radical and rupturist ideas. Hatred and resentment serve as fertiliser.

The images of a violent mob storming the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential headquarters in Brasilia have gone around the world. Just seven days earlier, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil's perennial left-wing leader, had celebrated his inauguration at the new beginning of another presidential term.

The former trade union leader had already governed Latin America's largest country in 2002 and 2006; he has now achieved another third term, after several years of facing judicial problems, accused of corruption and finally imprisoned - for almost two years - for accepting bribes worth millions.

His inauguration was not attended by the outgoing president - as the presidential canons dictate - because the far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro opted to leave Brasilia to take refuge in Miami. But not before stirring up discord and doubt about the veracity of the election result.

It was the same strategy also used by Donald Trump: first, to sow doubts about the impartiality of the electoral system; second, to warn his faithful followers that he will most probably lose because his victory will not be recognised; third, to consummate the iniquity after the results are known and publicly accuse the elections of having been botched and warn that votes have been "stolen" from him and, therefore, the victory; fourth, not to recognise the victory of the adversary; and fifth, to use all available spaces on their personal social networks to talk about fraud, electoral theft, the non-recognition of the other's victory and to call on the masses to mobilise to defend the stolen vote and, in any case, to prevent the winning candidate's investiture.

That 6 January 2021 has already gone down in the annals of the history of the world's largest democracy, which watched in astonishment as a band of "Trumpist" supporters tried to prevent the inauguration of Joe Biden, which was to be held two days later.

This horde, with their sticks, machetes, guns, horns on their heads and chains in their hands, arrived at the Capitol and smashed its doors and windows, broke into the legislators' offices and even destroyed documents. In this violent act five people died, only a few hours before Trump had poured all his hatred into his personal Twitter account insisting on the theft and fraud against him (he had been remarking on it for days) and continued, even when the mob was already doing its thing.

The last tweet he wrote in the midst of the chaos that he himself in some ways encouraged was reiterative: "These are things and events that happen when a landslide election victory is so abruptly and viciously taken away from the great patriots who have been treated so unfairly and badly for so long. Go home and in peace, remember this day forever".

Given the seriousness of the facts, the social network itself deleted the tweet and decided to suspend Trump's account, which has only been reinstated with the change of CEO at Twitter after being acquired by the tycoon, Elon Musk, on 28 October. His account has been reinstated almost a month later, although the former president has not used it again for the moment.

Beware of democratic regression 

In Germany in early August, a group of two hundred fascists - most of them identified by the German police - attempted a coup d'état by taking control of parliament. It all began with a large-scale protest march against the health controls implemented on the orders of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on the pandemic issue.

Among the huge crowd was a contingent carrying Nazi symbols, flags alluding to Hitler's era, which ended up heading towards the Reichstag to take it by force.

Initially, the intention to take control of Parliament spread like wildfire on social networks, and the security forces proceeded to arrest several people to defuse the situation.

Recently, the German Public Prosecutor's Office announced that a total of 25 people identified as far-right, fascist and mostly with military backgrounds were still in detention, after investigations that they had been planning a coup d'état for many months. In a published report, the Public Prosecutor's Office itself describes the group as a "terrorist organisation" with the idea of overthrowing the current system in order to return to the "Germany of 1871", inspired by conspiracy theories.

According to part of the official report: "The defendants are united by a profound rejection of state institutions and the free democratic order in Germany"

It was neither isolated, nor sudden, nor improvised what was intended to be done with the Reichstag. In Brazil, too, the investigations are now beginning to flow, and it is known that a group of Bolsonaro supporters may have been financed by businessmen opposed to Lula, and the responsibilities of several military commanders are about to be established.

Nor can it be ignored that, at the beginning of December and on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the president of Peru, Pedro Castillo, attempted a self-coup d'état to dissolve Congress and seize all powers. He has since been arrested and removed from office, with a preventive detention order (for 18 months); the political and social situation is very fragile in a Peru divided between those demanding new elections and those demanding Castillo's release. So far, street protests have left 18 people dead in southern Peru.

What is happening to the overall health of democracy? In fact, a document drawn up by experts at the Centre for International Information and Documentation in Barcelona (CIDOB) identifies the risk of democratic regression as one of the premises to which attention will have to continue to be paid throughout 2023.  

To find out more about this, I spoke with Carme Colomina and Anna Ayuso, both leading researchers at CIDOB, the former specialising in the European Union (EU), disinformation and global politics, and the latter in Latin America.

In Colomina's opinion, people have been warning and talking about this democratic involution for some time now, and there are even more and more studies that show how democratic quality on a global level has been losing ground in recent years.

"In fact, it is estimated that the level of democratic quality enjoyed by the citizens of the world at the moment is on a par with what we enjoyed in 1989; in other words, we have almost erased thirty years of democratic progress at a global level with the stroke of a pen, because we are in full regression", she states with conviction. 

What levers or mechanisms are failing, is it that the traditional voter has taken a step backwards, a demographic shift to younger age groups, citizen disenchantment...?

-It is very difficult to pinpoint one, two or three specific arguments because there is a confluence of radical changes and paradigms. If we focus on the issue of involution in these almost thirty years, the world has changed a great deal... for example, what globalisation does is to promote and reinforce global interconnectivity, but, at the same time, it probably also reduces states' capacity for influence, management and power in favour of a global governance that has also been shown to be weak.

For Colomina, there is first a weakening of the role of states. Although, of course, the whole process of digitalisation cannot be ignored, with the arrival of the internet playing an essential role.

"It has plunged us into a process of disintermediation... all those who for centuries had a monopoly on the interpretation of reality and the written word, be they academics, political parties, trade unions or the traditional media, ended up losing that monopoly because users and citizens have other ways of accessing information. Although there is often less ability to discern what information is truthful," she adds, also an academic at the College of Europe in Belgium.

What about the economic factor?

-We are in a moment that experts call the permanent crisis or the "permacrisis".  The great financial and economic crisis that began in 2008-2009 has created a much more unequal world. So, the economic crisis first becomes political and leads to a crisis of institutional confidence, because if governments stop providing security to citizens, they may feel more unprotected. 

Are we experiencing our democratic winter?

-We have two readings: there is a certain social malaise. Governments are obliged to find answers to this malaise or to this feeling that the population is living with is the first point; secondly, we are seeing more and more an organised extreme right, the hyperconnectivity that makes us strong, in some points makes us weaker or leaves us more exposed in others. Radical extremist parties have had the capacity to learn from each other, we see the reproduction of scenarios in very different countries and here we can intuit certain connections between what was experienced in the assault on the Capitol two years ago and the images that are reaching us from Brasilia. The message of electoral robbery that was constructed within Brazil was also used by the spokespersons of the American extreme right within the United States. 

Brazil a point of concern

For Anna Ayuso, the outlook is shaping up to be a convulsive time not only for Latin America. In the opinion of the CIDOB expert, Brazil is a very important country in the region, with a great deal of influence, and one that largely determines the dynamics that are taking place, especially in South America.

"What is happening has an effect on the region. In part, what is happening has to do not only with the region itself, but also with what is happening in the world. On the other hand, it has its internal peculiarities: it is a very large, diverse country with a very fragmented political system with many balances of power and inequalities. What we see is the result of two decades in which, on the one hand, political polarisation has been taking place within the institutions and, on the other hand, disaffection with the institutions, not only in Brazil. This is affecting the quality of democracy", she remarks.

Is it really Bolsonaro's hand that is stirring all this up?

-He has been the channel and catalyst for movements that already existed. The whole impeachment of Dilma Rousseff was also the result of protests and movements of this type, but with Bolsonaro all this was accentuated and then followed the "Trumpist" pattern. Bolsonaro himself set him as an example to follow and he has indeed done so, and this has had quite negative effects on coexistence, which is why there is so much misinformation on social networks. He has had a strong influence on a part of society, encouraging social confrontation... the opponent is an enemy to be eliminated and, for that, the rules have often been broken.

For Lula, Brazil's governability and the viability of the state are at risk, a very worrying aspect if he does not manage to bring political, social and economic forces together quickly.

"Consensus must be generated and this consensus must be based on a social pact that encompasses as much as possible. If you try to impose the most radical positions, then you polarise even more... especially in the last elections and in the previous ones, many people did not vote for one candidate, but against another candidate", says the professor of International Public Law at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.