Democracy is on the ballot in 2024

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/09/2023 (769 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Roughly one in four people worldwide could vote in general elections next year. From the world’s two biggest democracies, India and the United States, to Egypt, Mexico, Pakistan, South Africa, the European Parliament and more, citizens will select who will lead them into the twilight of the 2020s.

For most countries, the stakes have arguably never been higher. From the day they assume office, these new governments will be faced with navigating a fearsome array of challenges — rising unaffordability, geopolitical hostilities, profound technological disruption and climate chaos.

Yet tackling these issues, both domestically and globally, will also require leaders to re-instil popular faith in democracy. Many politicians are choosing instead to foment fear and distrust. Democratic norms and institutional safeguards must be protected as well from aspiring demagogues denigrating them in a quest for power.

Indeed, the past three decades of globalization delivered humanity’s most prosperous era. The share of the global population living in extreme poverty dropped from 38 per cent in 1990 to eight percent in 2019. Middle classes sprouted up across previously destitute or military-ruled areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

But, according to research by the Paris-based World Inequality Lab, while inequality between countries was reduced, inequality within countries exploded. The consequences, both real and perceived, have been concentrated in high and middle-income nations.

Over the last decade, disenchanted voters across the democratic world — their personal aspirations ever more disconnected from reality — have thus channelled legitimate grievances into populist movements peddling toxic nostalgia and simplistic solutions to complex problems.

Intrinsic to each camp has been the broad and explicit rejection of expertise. In the U.K., Brexit champions promised to “take back control” by leaving the European Union; Donald Trump vowed to “make America great again.”

In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was re-elected in 2019 thanks to campaigns that dehumanized the country’s 200 million Muslims. Rather than looking inward, corrupt strongmen in Hungary, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and elsewhere blamed their nations’ ills on foreign conspiracies.

Fast-forward to September 2022, in the wake of the pandemic, and the UN Development Programme stunned observers by releasing a report showing its Human Development Index — a broad country-by-country measure of human progress — had declined for a second consecutive year due to “cascading global crises.” According to the agency’s calculations, this amounted to the erasure of five years’ worth of global gains in life expectancy, education levels and quality of life.

It’s therefore unsurprising that disillusionment and extremism are sweeping through politics at every level. Findings from this year’s World Values Survey add to reams of evidence indicating how large chunks of electorates everywhere are fragmenting into illiberal tribes.

These are appearing on both the left and the right and within religious and non-religious populations alike. For such voters, immediate concerns over personal security, identity and belonging in an unstable world take precedence over preserving hard-won systems for upholding universal rights and freedoms.

Now added to the mix is generative artificial intelligence capable of producing strikingly realistic images, texts and audio based on human inputs. Experts warn malicious actors could use this technology to alter election outcomes by supercharging misinformation and false propaganda spread across social media to sway voters into supporting anti-democratic causes.

In June, the campaign for Florida governor Ron DeSantis released apparently AI-generated photos showing Donald Trump kissing Dr. Anthony Fauci, a figure reviled by right-wing America for his role as the public face of coronavirus lockdown measures. Before that, the Republican National Committee in April released a computer-generated video suggesting that a second Biden term would turn America into a dystopian hellscape.

At a time of generalized peril and uncertainty, further erosion of democracy due to populist backlashes or authoritarian power grabs would inhibit the world’s ability to address other global crises.

That’s because pluralist societies that accommodate a range of ideas are more conducive to innovation. Compared to all other political systems, democracy also reduces corruption, enhances economic freedom, improves labour conditions, enables social mobility, increases gender equality and protects minorities’ rights, albeit all imperfectly.

It also prevents anyone from centralizing power, ensuring ultranationalist, ego-driven decision making can’t spiral into global catastrophe, as has been apparent throughout Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. China’s President Xi Jinping could be next, by acting on threats to annex Taiwan.

Democracy is certainly flawed. But it is the most agile and inclusive system of governance we have. Billions of voters will soon cast a ballot for candidates that either embrace it or are plotting in one way or another to dismantle it.

Kyle Hiebert is a Winnipeg-based researcher and analyst and former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.