“Our house is burning and we are looking elsewhere. » With this formula, Jacques Chirac had denounced, in 2002, our indifference to climate change. The same reflection applies to another disruption, that which threatens democracy in the world. It has been steadily declining for nearly two decades.
In the euphoria of an apparent triumph of democratic values, the end of the cold war had ushered in a golden age. The nations liberated from the communist yoke joined in, followed by other countries – 70 in total. Communing in the exaltation of globalization and “gentle commerce”, a self-confident West was convinced that the resulting enrichment would inevitably bring new States towards the liberal model. This illusion has long been maintained by the few areas of freedom granted in authoritarian regimes, whether in China or Russia. Some even persisted in discerning in Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, from 2008 to 2012, a “reformer” figure.
But the curve was reversed between 2005 and 2010, bringing to a hundred the number of countries in democratic regression, according to the concurring conclusions of two independent institutions, Freedom House and V-Dem, which are authoritative in observing the state of the democracy around the world. During the past decade, the number of dictatorships has thus increased from twenty to thirty, according to the latest report by V-Dem, including five in the year 2021 alone, leading the UN Secretary General to deplore a “epidemic of coups”. A quarter of humanity today lives under a dictatorship, while the group of electoral autocracies comprises 60 countries, 44% of the world’s population. The liberal democracies are now only 34, the 55 States confining themselves to respecting the electoral forms constituting the last group.
Massive use of misinformation
The landscape has transformed over the past decade with a deliberate polarization of societies in some 40 countries, as seen under Trump in the United States and in Brazil under Bolsonaro. A massive use of disinformation has taken place, both in the internal public space and as a weapon of international relations.
Even the most established democratic regimes are exposed to crises of representation that fuel populism, nationalist impulses, dynamics of radicalization and the rise of extremism. The European Union is also plagued by these abuses: six member states were in 2021, according to V-Dem, on a slope of democratic regression. Hungary and Poland stand out there by the assumed violation of certain provisions of the treaties and ignore the injunctions of the European Commission. Two formations were invited, in September, in this volatile landscape, the Democrats of Sweden, who dictated their program to the conservative government, and the Brothers of Italy, at the head of a far-right coalition.
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