Since the beginning of this historic “year of elections” worldwide, it was apparent that none would be more important in shaping global democratic prospects than the presidential contest in the United States. Across a broad span of countries and partisan leanings, people who value freedom, democracy, and the rule of law—including leaders of government, opposition parties, civic activists, businesspersons, journalists, or ordinary citizens—watched with growing trepidation as political polarization intensified in the United States and Donald Trump drew closer to retaking the White House. With Trump’s decisive victory in the election, these admirers of the long arc of the United States’ democratic journey, if not necessarily all its global policies, now fear what might come next for the country and, by extension, democracies across the world.
The rise of autocratic regimes across the world over the last decade and a half has put democrats on high alert. In the last year, successful efforts to beat back antidemocratic movements and governments have provided some indication that this protracted “democratic recession” could be reversed. But Trump’s victory has dealt a blow to these hopes. His triumph in the Electoral College and the popular vote leaves democratic friends and allies of the United States wondering: Will a Trump presidency demand more burden-sharing from them, or even abandon them altogether? And will the United States remain a liberal democracy, or will its institutions gradually erode beyond recognition or repair?
Early analysis of the election results suggests that Trump’s victory was more attributable to issues like the economy and immigration rather than an endorsement of his autocratic tendencies. And yet whatever the reason Americans may have had for supporting Trump, his campaign made it clear that he will be unencumbered by any global checks on his and his administration’s antidemocratic impulses. As has been the case in other backsliding democracies in the last decade, the defense of democratic norms in the United States will therefore depend on the actions of other leaders of government and society in Congress, state and local governments, the civil service, the armed forces and local police, business, civic institutions, and perhaps most of all, the courts. Their success or failure in upholding the Constitution and the rule of law will heavily determine global democracy’s outlook in the coming years.
BOOMS AND BUSTS
In the United States, support for the spread of freedom and democracy around the world has not reflected any partisan affiliation. From the late 1970s, with President Jimmy Carter’s emphasis on global human rights, through the presidency of George W. Bush in the early 2000s, pro-democracy parties, politicians, and movements around the world gained ground with both Democrats and Republicans in the White House. These gains were most dramatic during the presidencies of two Republicans (Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush) and one Democrat (Bill Clinton).
Toward the end of the second George W. Bush presidency, however, global democratic progress ground to a halt. With the failed U.S. intervention in Iraq, a global financial crisis that began in the United States, and a surge in the power and self-confidence of authoritarian rivals such as China and Russia, global politics shifted in the direction of autocracy. Since 2006, according to Freedom House’s annual measurements, freedom and democracy have been on the decline. Authoritarian populists have won at the ballot box and then weaponized their power to eliminate checks and balances and decimate their opponents. Beginning in the early years of this century with Turkey and Venezuela, a number of emerging and even seemingly durable democracies have seen the rise of self-styled defenders of “the people” against “corrupt elites” and “enemies within.” These populist leaders have taken their election victories as mandates to pack the judiciary, shackle the press, cow the business community, silence and prosecute critics, and assert political dominance over the civil service, prosecutors, tax authorities, the security apparatus, and the military. This process has strangled democracy not just in countries with longstanding democratic traditions but also in countries such as Bangladesh, Benin, Georgia, Honduras, Hungary, Serbia, and Tunisia, which had turned toward democracy in the post–Cold War era. Some larger countries, such as India, Indonesia, Mexico, and the Philippines have experienced significant democratic backsliding, but experts don’t agree on whether they still meet the minimal standards of electoral democracy. Others, such as Sri Lanka, have oscillated back and forth, with more democratic presidents and corrupt populist autocrats alternating as leaders.
With the rising tide of democratic setbacks, the growing assertiveness of Russia and China, and the electoral gains of illiberal populist parties and candidates in Europe and the United States, many observers feared the authoritarian trend was becoming a juggernaut. Yet over the past two years, it has faltered. Brazil’s right-wing populist strongman Jair Bolsonaro sought to undermine the country’s democratic institutions after his election as president in 2018 but narrowly lost his bid for reelection in 2022 (and failed in his extralegal effort to overturn the result). In May 2023, the Turkish opposition came within a few points of beating a long-ruling populist strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, despite fielding an uninspiring candidate who failed to offer a convincing agenda for economic improvement. In a presidential run-off election held three months later in Guatemala, Bernardo Arévalo, an anticorruption reformer, decisively defeated the country’s venal political establishment, represented by former first lady Sandra Torres, an outcome that has opened up new possibilities for democratic change. And in Poland’s parliamentary election last October, a broad-based alliance led by the center-right Civic Platform defeated the illiberal populist Law and Justice party and halted the country’s eight-year slide toward autocracy.
OUT WITH A WHIMPER?
Although the results of this “year of elections” have until now been mixed in their implications for democracy, they have offered many glimmers of hope. On the strength of a bold strategy of “radical love” to transcend the country’s political polarization, Turkey’s political opposition made stunning gains in municipal elections in March. That same month, Senegal reversed democratic backsliding with an opposition presidential victory by 44-year-old Bassirou Diomaye Faye, after two-term incumbent president Macky Sall failed to lift term limits. In May, the African National Congress, South Africa’s increasingly corrupt ruling party, got its comeuppance at the polls when it lost its parliamentary majority and was forced to form a coalition with the Democratic Alliance, the country’s principal opposition party. India’s strongman prime minister, Narendra Modi, secured a third term in national elections staged over several weeks in April and May, but the strength of his ruling BJP party was significantly reduced in parliament.
And most stunningly, Venezuela’s democratic opposition overcame massive repression, fear, and resource deficits, as well as its own divisions, to defeat Nicolás Maduro after a decade of despotic rule in the July presidential election. When Maduro refused to concede defeat, the opposition demonstrated impressive vigilance and organization, presenting copies of the official tallies from over 80 percent of the country’s polling stations to demonstrate that their candidate, Edmundo González, had won in a landslide. (All that is missing to complete the opposition’s triumph is a coherent strategy from the world’s democracies to compel the Maduro regime to accept the results and transfer power, in exchange for amnesty from prosecution at home or abroad.)
These outcomes—along with Bangladesh’s student-led revolution in August, which toppled the regime of Sheikh Hasina, the world’s lone female autocrat—did not end the global democratic recession, but they brought it closer to a possible tipping point. That point drew closer still in late October, when the Umbrella for Democratic Change, Botswana’s principal opposition party alliance, defeated the abusive and corrupt incumbent Botswana Democratic Party, which had held power continuously since the country gained independence in 1966. The result sent shock waves across much of Africa, where Botswana has long been seen as a model of development success despite its small size.
But throughout 2024, all eyes remained trained on the U.S. election as the most important indicator of global democracy’s future. It was unclear which direction the Republican Party would take: toward Trump, the illiberal populist, or toward an internationalist Republican in the mold of Ronald Reagan, such as Nikki Haley? After Trump’s resounding victory in the Republican primary, the question was whether Trump would enter a downward spiral of grievance, intolerance, xenophobia, and conspiracy theorizing or try to broaden his base with a positive focus on economic growth and national strength. Pro-democracy advocates all over the world watched with disappointment and alarm as Trump took the former course, plumbing the depths of bigotry and fear, and vowing to take vengeance.
Throughout 2024, all eyes remained trained on the U.S. election as the most important indicator of global democracy’s future.
But the U.S. election should not be interpreted as a vote for autocracy. Only 17 million Americans voted for Trump in the Republican primary—a landslide against his Republican opponents but barely ten percent of registered voters and seven percent of eligible voters. An AP survey of 120,000 voters in the week before the election showed that the key drivers of support for Trump were anxieties about the economy, including the persistent effects of inflation, and immigration. Economic concerns especially drove his astonishing inroads with young and minority voters. These kinds of policy concerns were so powerful that, among the majority of all voters who said Trump lacked the moral character to be president, one in ten voted for him anyway. And of the near majority of voters who said they were “very concerned” that a Trump presidency would “bring the U.S. closer to authoritarianism,” a tenth of them also voted for him anyway. Analysts had been arguing for months that it was a “change election” in which two-thirds of voters judged that the country was heading in the wrong direction. Democratic candidate Kamala Harris failed to present policies that would address voters’ anxieties about high consumer prices, unaffordable housing, and retreating prospects for good-paying jobs, and she failed to convince the electorate she represented real change after serving as vice president under Joe Biden. Thus, she violated a core lesson of numerous efforts to defeat authoritarian populists at the polls: victory requires programmatic appeals to material concerns beyond just defending democracy.
Nevertheless, when voters elect authoritarian-minded leaders for instrumental reasons, they typically get the baggage of revenge, intimidation, and lust for power that accompanies their candidates’ policy promises. Over the course of an increasingly dark 2024 campaign, Trump promised to unleash presidential power on the Justice Department, other federal agencies, and even the military, to persecute his critics, punish unfriendly media, purge and politicize the civil service, and round up and deport masses of immigrants. These are all actions autocrats take when they win power at the ballot box. Candidates who borrow the language of fascists and strongmen to denounce their opponents as “vermin” and “the enemy within” do not suddenly evince the democratic virtues of compromise and moderation when they take office. And politicians who reject the legitimacy of any election they do not win try to use political power to tilt the rules and institutions so they will never lose. Autocrats like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Orban in Hungary, and Erdogan in Turkey followed this script when they came to power.
After an initial four-year term as prime minister, Orban was defeated in his bid for reelection in 2002. He resolved not to allow the opposition to win again when he returned to office. He won back power in 2010, and he has so far made good on his promise by heavily gerrymandering elections, stacking the judiciary, stoking fear, and throttling the media and civic institutions. The United States is a much older and deeper democracy than Hungary was in 2010, at that point just two decades removed from the fall of communism. Power is more dispersed, and checks and balances are stronger. But in the end, constitutions are only as strong as the willingness of people—politicians, judges, civil servants, business leaders, and ordinary citizens—to defend them.
Those who have seen their own countries bend to authoritarian ambition know that the second Trump term will put American democracy to a more serious test. If Trump, enabled by the Supreme Court’s recent decision granting sweeping presidential immunity, comes close to fulfilling his campaign pledges and following through on the plans laid out in his allies’ Project 2025, the United States will see the most intense assault on checks and balances and civil liberties in its peacetime history. This will be a much more carefully strategized, comprehensive, and relentless assault on the country’s democratic norms and institutions than anything in Trump’s first term, save for the January 6, 2021 riot. The history of challenged and failed democracies across more than a century points consistently to a common lesson: for liberal democracy to survive this challenge, citizens in positions of responsibility, civilian and military, must honor the oath they have sworn to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” It is an oath to a principle, not a leader or a party.
For all the encouraging signs from the global year of elections, the most important question—whether American democracy can withstand four years of attempts to subvert it—remains contested. It will take years to answer.
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