Growth of populism did not alter the balance between democracy and its reverse – 03/01/2023 – Maria Hermínia Tavares

The phrase is famous: “The reports of my death were greatly exaggerated”. It was how the American writer Mark Twain (1835-1910) reacted to the unfounded news that he had died.

The same applies to the dire predictions about the fate of democracies besieged by the worldwide rise of populist movements and governments of the right or left.

The best-known of such prophecies is found in the best-selling book by political scientists Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, “How Democracies Die.” Reason for insomnia of the democrats who take threats to the representative government to the head, the book was rightly criticized in last Monday’s edition of this Folha by my colleague Marcus André Melo.

Indeed, extensive studies have shown that populists accumulate losses rather than gains; other surveys indicate that, on a global scale, there has been no significant increase in closed regimes. The electoral defeat of Donald Trump and, later, of his Brazilian counterpart are recent examples of the resilience of democratic systems threatened by rulers ostensibly hostile to their values ​​and rules.

Still, it would be wrong to assume that nothing has changed since the end of the 20th century and the beginning of this one – the golden decade of representative democracy. Contrary to what many imagined at the time, the expansion of capitalism in China made it a world power, but did not bring it political opening — rather, the reaffirmation of one-party authoritarianism. In equal measure, capitalist Russia has become a violent and bellicose one-person dictatorship.

At the same time, anti-system movements grew in democratic countries, with significant electoral strength. Generically called populist, they sympathize with authoritarianism and are repulsed by the values ​​and rules that limit the concentration of power in the Executive and ensure the rights of minorities.

In power, they invest against the institutions that guarantee the fairness of electoral competition, the independence of the Judiciary and the freedom of the press.

This has long been the case in Venezuela, Hungary, Poland and, intermittently, in Italy. This is what is also registered today in countries as diverse as India and Turkey, Mexico and Israel. Not to mention what devastated Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Donald Trump’s United States.

The growing scale of authoritarian populism has so far not altered the balance between democracy and its opposite in the world. But it is significantly changing the political game and forces a system whose nature requires negotiation and consensus building to operate under the specter of political radicalization.

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