Combating Authoritarianism

“The surge of authoritarian populists appears to be less inevitable than it did a year ago.”

So began the 2018 World Report by Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental organization that investigates and reports on human rights abuses happening throughout the world. Reflecting on the year’s events, the report notes “popular reaction in a broad range of countries, bolstered in some cases by political leaders with the courage to stand up for human rights, has left the fate of many of these populist agendas more uncertain.” In its 2019 World Report,  Human Rights Watch again found reason for optimism: “while the autocrats and rights abusers may capture the headlines, the defenders of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law are also gaining strength…. the excesses of autocratic rule are fueling a powerful counterattack.”

In her book, reviewed in a previous blog post, Ece Temelkuran provided activists with the warning signs of emergent authoritarianism. In that book, How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship, she challenges opponents of populist movements to engage politically, lest movements “become more invasive, and energized with more hostility and manipulativeness.” If the Human Rights Watch assessment is correct, that would certainly ease the anxieties experienced by readers of Temelkuran’s book.

Progress in reversing the populist trend is evident in recent elections and mass demonstrations, in countries large and small. A prominent example of the former is the election of progressive reformer Zuzana Caputova as president of Slovakia on March 30, 2019. Caputova, a 46-year-old environmental lawyer and anti-corruption activist, had never held public office. She scored a 58% to 42% victory over a far-right establishment candidate.

Turkey’s autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was handed a setback when his candidate for mayor of Istanbul was defeated in a June 2019 rerun election by Ekrem Imamoglu of the secular Republican People’s Party. Imamoglu had won an earlier election which Erdogan subsequently had nullified.

In Germany’s 2019 elections for the European Parliament, the populist AfD party received 11% of the vote, down somewhat from its 12.6% capture of the vote in 2017 national parliament election.

In Africa two long-term autocratic presidents were defeated: Gambia’s President Yahya Jammeh in the December 2016 election; Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe was ousted in a 2017 coup, followed by elections in July 2018. Sudan’s ruler of the last 30 years has been ousted, replaced by a military-civilian power-sharing arrangement.

The Maldives Democratic Party candidate replaced the country’s autocratic president in April 2019 elections, won by a former president who had returned from exile in 2018.

A special election in Britain in August 2019 was lost by the Conservative Party, leaving Prime Minister Boris Johnson with a one-seat majority in Parliament, compounding the uncertainty over Brexit.

Prior to these 2019 elections, United States voters issued a rebuke of President Trump’s right-wing policies in giving control of the House of Representatives to the Democratic Party in the 2018 midterm elections.

Greece’s July 2019 election was initially hailed for leading the country away from the left-wing Syriza party and back to normalcy. But in his first weeks in office, the new center-right Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has demonstrated authoritarian tendencies rather than moderate policies.

Public protests, a second expression of rejection of populist rule, have occurred throughout the world: Budapest, Poland, Russia, the Czech Republic and Hungary among others in Europe; Turkey, Algeria, Sudan, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, Hong Kong, as well as the United States.

Certainly, populists have not been defeated in all cases, and are gaining ground in others. But what one former State Department official has called a “backlash to the backlash” is challenging the “populist surge.”