2023-10-31 20:00:09
The body, a biopolitical issue – October 6, 2023, in Columbus (Ohio), demonstration against the inclusion of the right to abortion in the State Constitution. AP
During the victories of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Brexit, the narrative of a “populist wave”. With a few years of hindsight, the question changes: are we experiencing a global democratic regression? Since 2016, an international program has quantified and analyzed the evolution of democratic standards in 173 countries. Currently, thirty-seven are experiencing a moderate decline in civil liberties, and eleven are experiencing a sharp contraction – but fourteen are experiencing an expansion.
This article is taken from “Special Edition Le Monde – 40 maps to understand a fractured world”2023. This special issue is on sale at newsstands or online by going to our store website.
The authority of governments goes hand in hand with a certain tension in societies. Thus, another program counts protest movements since 2017: 132 countries have experienced significant ones. The democratic malaise does exist, and three transnational dynamics can be identified.
A desire to control bodies
First and foremost, we observe the widespread return of what Michel Foucault called the “biopolitics”, control of bodies. Having become a major issue in the desire for revenge on liberalism, it can combine various themes: such as international denunciations of a plot to promote LGBT+ sexualities within the framework of the destruction of traditional identities also through immigration, for the benefit of a globalist plan, whose symbol would be the (Jewish) financier George Soros.
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The female body is a crucial issue: Afghanistan and Iran bear witness to the links between the fate of women and that of democracy. But in liberal regimes, it is also an issue, from the cancellation of the national right of access to abortion in the United States since 2022 to its virtual ban in Poland. We also observe the emergence of misogynists “incels” (for involuntary celibates), a new violent radicalization generally linked to the ultra-right, of which Canada was the first country to classify a killing as a terrorist act – the arrest of an “incel” preparing a terrorist act. The second occurred last September in France.
The control of migrant bodies is a central theme: Denmark has become an international model for restricting immigration, while Italy, governed by the far-right Fratelli d’Italia party – which denounced the hand of Soros behind the ethnic substitution plan in Italy –considerably increases its authorizations for labor immigration while being aggressive towards illegal migrants and the NGOs which rescue them at sea. What is accepted is the controlled body.
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