This has been called the year of ‘democracy’s Super Bowl’ – presumably by an American first, but these things tend to catch on.

As many as 40 countries are holding general elections in 2024, covering 40% of the world population, and a further 30 countries have other elections, bringing the total to half.

Not all are democratic, by any stretch. They include Russia, Iran and Rwanda. But more democracy is happening this year, you might say, then ever before. It would be a lovely thing to celebrate, if it didn’t feel a bit like a last hurrah.

Democracies are in decline over the world. Narendra Modi in India and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have systematically weakened the press, the civil service, the judiciary and the party system. Bernardo Arévalo had to overcome attempts to overturn his landslide victory in order to take up the Guatemalan presidency. Before the present war, Israel was facing a constitutional crisis over Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempts to disable the Supreme Court.

Autocracies are on the march. One reason Vladimir Putin is so committed to his costly invasion of Ukraine is that having a democracy on Russia’s doorstep undermines his repressive single-party state. Bad news for Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland… China is thought to be watching and biding its time before doing the same to Taiwan.

All of this makes the outcome of the US election in November seem alarmingly important. Donald Trump and many of his supporters have sheer contempt for democracy at home and have already seriously undermined it. And he has promised to stop supporting it abroad, abandoning Ukraine and pulling the plug on NATO. In which case, surviving democracies may be about to discover, for the first time since the blitz in Britain’s case, what it’s like living outside the shadow of a superpower’s wings.

The bitterest irony is that as recently as the 1990s the US political scientist Francis Fukuyama could argue that in the universal triumph of democracy, history was reaching its endpoint. In 2003, George Bush and Tony Blair thought they were bringing that a step closer through the invasion of Iraq. The Arab Spring of 2010-12 promised the same. How times have changed.

Ah well, if the tide can turn so much in one decade, perhaps it can turn again in another. Votes and prayers can both seem like casting my hopes out into the abyss. But they are what I have and I’d be lost without them, so I’ll keep them coming as long as I have the ability.

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This article was published in the February 2024 edition of Reform

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