Moderator: Steven Erlanger, diplomatic correspondent, The New York Times
Participants: Yamini Aiyar, visiting senior fellow at the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University and former president and chief executive of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi; Yves Leterme, former prime minister of Belgium and member of the Club de Madrid forum; Oliver Röpke, president of the European Economic and Social Committee of the European Union; and Lwando Xaso, a lawyer, author and founder of Including Society
Excerpts from the panel State of Democracy — Assessing the Mega Election Year have been edited and condensed.
STEVEN ERLANGER Supposedly more than 40 percent of the world heads toward the polls this year, seven of the 10 most populous countries. But what is the state of democracy? We have challenges to democracy both within consolidated democracies in the West and other places like India, but also challenges from all kinds of strains and stresses.
First we have Yamini Aiyar, who ran the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and has just come to Brown University. Tell us about Indian democracy and South Asian democracy and its challenges.
YAMINI AIYAR I come from a region that in many ways tells us a story of the vulnerabilities of democracy but also gives us a little bit of hope, I think, of the resilience of democracy when citizens take control. Our democratic institutions are fledgling; they are vulnerable to creeping authoritarianism, which is very much the context in which Indians voted in April, May and early June this year against a backdrop of strongman leadership.
The political party that was running the government, the B.J.P. [Bharatiya Janata Party], and our prime minister, [Narendra] Modi, were extremely popular and set a goal for achieving 400 seats, essentially total dominance, in the lower house in our Parliament. And on the eve of the elections the chief opposition party, the Congress Party, said its accounts were frozen. A couple of senior politicians who were leading subnational governments were thrown into jail. It did look like this was an election that was to be won before it even took place.
ERLANGER Would you say that’s the reason Modi didn’t do as well as expected?
AIYAR Oh, absolutely. Even though the B.J.P. and Prime Minister Modi have proved their resilience — he is back in power — the realities of what authoritarianism can do to our everyday lives and democracy was on voters’ minds.
ERLANGER In Europe we’ve seen something sort of similar, for example, in Poland, right? We’ve seen a Law and Justice party that maybe pushed things a bit too far and was set back. But we also see other things happening in Europe that make some people question whether democracy is working as well as it should.
YVES LETERME I think democracy is still very much in demand, which I think should be a very positive element. The problem is that when people ask for electoral democracy, liberal democracy, apparently there’s a frustration with the offer formulated by political parties and by institutions.
Political parties have been traditionally organized as providers not only of candidates, but also of thoughts, ideology of programs; they haven’t really integrated this new way of opinion-making and of debates that are more horizontal. The liberal democracies have I think benefited from the fact that traditional parties have been hiding away too long from really naming the problems.
Representative democracy is facing a crisis in all its parts, but on the other hand, things can be addressed.
ERLANGER In some places like Hungary, like Slovakia, as in a way with India, you have democracies that are being kind of centralized from within, sometimes with popular support.
OLIVER RÖPKE One of the reasons that we said before, for the crisis of democracy, is that people are not interested. It’s not true. In Austria and Germany in recent elections, the voter participation increased massively, but right-wing parties benefited from it.
As a trade unionist, I’m convinced that social security and social justice is a good instrument and it’s somehow a guarantee against this. But it’s not completely true because we see that also, in countries where we don’t have a particular severe economic or social situation, the far right is on the rise. So there are other reasons. It’s true, migration is one of them. And we should say that democracy is not only about the process; it’s also about the results.
But if you talk about the process, I think this is absolutely a precondition that we have democracy also between the elections, and that we have a vibrant civil society, strong social partners, and I would really make a strong plea for strong institutions.
ERLANGER Lwando Xaso is a constitutional lawyer from South Africa. Talk to us about the transition in South Africa — where it’s going well, where it’s going off the rails, and what lessons do we have?
LWANDO XASO My pursuing constitutional law is a direct result of coming of age in the ’90s and witnessing this incredible period in our history — the first president I can remember is Nelson Mandela. How do you create one nation out of the fragments of the past and create one law to address what happened in the past? So 2024 is a moment of truth for South Africa in the sense that it is the 30th anniversary of our democracy.
A metaphor that we use a lot is the idea that a Constitution like ours is meant to serve as a bridge. It is meant to take our nation from the past to the future. What I’ve come to realize is we’ve had a revolution in South Africa. If “revolution” means changing regimes, we’ve had that. Transformation is something different from a revolution. Transformation requires a change of heart.
ERLANGER One of the obvious challenges to democracy comes from, if you like, the more authoritarian world, the Russia-China notion. How do you see it?
AIYAR One of the reasons why India went down the path that it did in 2014 [the year Modi was first elected prime minister] was because there was a general sense that we could do with a little bit less democracy, we’ll take that risk, if we get a lot of economic development.
The biggest protests we’ve had in India in the last five years have been actively nonparty political. They’ve gone to the streets in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka. So there is also the first emergence of populism of this kind that we’ve seen in the last decade, decade-plus that has challenged democracy using democratic institutions to challenge elite plutocracies that had dominated democracy.
We’re seeing a new kind of mobilization that is challenging the fundamental — or questioning the fundamental institutions of democracy itself — and it’s time for political parties, and our politicians, and society as a whole, to have that conversation.
ERLANGER Is there a European answer to this argument?
LETERME I think we’re still in the situation where populations increasingly question the system. People have over the last couple of decades have increasingly been under the impression that the core task of public authority is to protect people — physical security, security about their own future.
ERLANGER When I was covering the German elections, one of the things people who voted for far-right parties said to me was “You know, the people in Berlin, they think it’s their job to save the world. We worry about ourselves.”
RÖPKE Democracy is not only about the process or the values — you should really see that these people that you mention, they want to see results. I think the perception is that other systems can deliver without our values. They have the impression that we talk about our values, but not about really what matters for these people.
And I think the second point is polarization and disinformation. Recently we’ve been to Brazil; we’ve seen that Lula [President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva] has re-established the structures that were totally dismantled by his predecessor. And now they are struggling with a few people who really think with powerful social media they can undermine the judicial system. We are not here yet in Europe, but I think it goes step by step in this direction. And we have to defend our institutions and our democracy.
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