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By Robin V. Sears

February 22, 2024

Despite the despair that hordes of doom-laden media would have you believe, democracy is not dying. Under attack, yes. Collapsing, no.

Two billion citizens will go to the polls this year but 1.5 billion will be forced to vote in fraudulent elections by autocratic governments, goes the wail. Apart from the alignment of dates, what’s changed? Autocrats always stage phony elections. A more significant test of the power of democratic values is understanding why autocrats feel they must play electoral charades. “More Brutal Dictatorship – We Promise!” is a not a winning campaign slogan.

Democracy is astonishingly resilient. Yes, corrupt democrats and tyrants like Adolf Hitler in Germany, Benito Mussolini in Italy, Francisco Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, held Europe in their grip for decades. Democracy was dead, was the expert view. Today, each country is a thriving democracy.

That Poland and Hungary were lost to democracy for the foreseeable future was a more recent consensus. Donald Tusk has begun restoring Polish democracy in just weeks. A majority of Poles today say they have faith in his ability to restore democracy. In Hungary, Viktor Orban’s time will come soon.

The list of counter-narratives to “democracy is dying” claims could go on for pages. Democracy is resilient, in part, because every other system of government is awful, as Churchill observed. Secondly, the institutions of democracy — the legal system, the security establishment, powerful private sector leaders — have demonstrated their ability to push back on angry populism. One can look at Israel and Trumpian America for proofs.

But democracy is being challenged by a nihilistic, angry brigade of parties ranging from neo-Nazi to shallow populist. Instead of blaming bewildered and ignorant voters for this political virus, it might be more honest to ask ourselves what we have done to contribute to its spread. This disease is always triggered by the failures of established parties.

The answer is simple and clear. Liberal democratic governments have failed to either stop unhealthy trends or deliver on promises for many, many years. They have appeared to support the interests of the rich first. Conservatives and the new hard-right populists have turned to working-class voters for their new base. Ironically, to considerable success despite the fact that, when in power, they cut taxes for the rich.

As Oxfam reported in January, the world is creating a new billionaire every thirty hours, while real wages have, at best, grown in single digits since the pandemic. The top five billionaires’ net worth has doubled in that same period, while wages trail inflation for 1.7 billion people. Trust in government and its ability to deliver health, housing and education at costs that the average voter can afford has slid. This breakdown in trust that the state will protect and serve citizens equally has left a large hole in the wall of liberal democracy through which angry populism has driven. At Davos this year, the theme was “Rebuilding Trust”. A trite sentiment, perhaps. But unless governments get better at serving the needs of a majority of their citizens, they will continue to betray trust. The growth of distrust will continue the slow rot of democracy, each blow doing more damage.

In a world where redistribution of wealth has faded from many political platforms, what remains for populism is the zero-sum lure of score-settling, or ‘winner take all’ — your win is my loss. This is the Trump narrative, and in only slightly less vulgar terms, that of Pierre Poilievre. In Trump’s case, “I will be your vengeance.” Poilievre’s more Canadian appeal to grievance is to “shut down the gatekeepers” on your behalf.

History offers a clear counter-narrative to this period of peril: democracy is resilient and survives. The paths to recovery after being effectively undermined by autocrats vary. But some drivers appear universal.

Trump uses traditional fascist rhetoric in describing immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of America. Poilievre, again more delicately, appeals to his growing nativist base saying that too many immigrants are making housing unaffordable. Another pretzel-logic foolishness. Immigrants build houses, and jobs, and communities. It is easy to see this rising tide of incitement against the state and government itself as fatal to democracy.

The upcoming federal election will test all these tensions, domestic and systemic. Poilievre suffers from the strategic weakness that has unmoored his party as a national force since 1993. Its base is the old, the small-town, and the rural Western Canadian. It has failed to build secure strongholds where more than two out of three Canadians live — big cities. Occasionally, as under Harper, it grabs a chunk of suburban seats. But suburbia is always politically volatile. The ridings see as much as 20% change in voters annually, as new immigrants move in, and others leave.  Poilievre’s declared political innovation is to appeal to working class Canadians — a tactic that failed his two predecessors.

Yes, a Poilievre-led government would be irritating, sometimes likely enraging, but also doomed. Having promised greater services in housing, health and education, inevitably meaning more spending, and, at the same time, to cut taxes. Poilievre has adopted the childish pretzel logic that has snared right-wing conservatives around the world. Yes, Poilievre would set back Canada’s climate battle, then pour billions on fire and flood relief. Yes, he would say things about the media, universities and NGOs that will be unpalatable at best. Yes, he would embarrass Canada on the international stage, given his nonsense about Ukraine and his Cold War rhetoric on China. His failures in one term would only lead to an even larger bounce back to more progressive policy.

Among the alternatives, Jagmeet Singh seems to have new opportunities in areas other than the defence of democracy. His religion seems less an issue to Canadians than it was 10 years ago. We have all had to digest the rise of antisemitism, Islamophobia and old-fashioned white supremacist racism since then. He has an authenticity on such issues than none of his competitors do.

Poilievre can be beaten, but Justin Trudeau makes it hard. He has become one of those political figures, even among many who voted for him in 2015, whose public appearances are painful. His campaign managers might well take a page from his father’s brilliant campaign strategist. In 1980, when Trudeau père was seen as equally unelectable, Keith Davey ran what he called a ‘low-bridge’ campaign. He kept Pierre Trudeau out of the limelight. So, in Canada’s battle with populism, can Trudeau at least slow the decline, by taking himself more frequently offstage? Can he persuade some of his drifting voters to come back? He is a seasoned and clever campaigner. And he is determined to redeem himself before he goes.

History offers a clear counter-narrative to this period of peril: democracy is resilient and survives. The paths to recovery after being effectively undermined by autocrats vary. But some drivers appear universal. Undemocratic states are inevitably corrupt, no one can whistle-blow against corrupt leaders without facing very severe consequences. They are by definition inefficient and ineffective as key government roles are granted to loyalists, competent or not. Recep Tayyip Erdogan made his son-in-law finance minister in Turkey, sending the Turkish currency down 3.8% in one hour, and leading to triple-digit inflation.

In Poland, Donald Tusk is fighting daily with the PiS party opponents of democracy, even after their defeat. Democracy will always recover but the damage needing repair will be greater after a second Trump term. Hungary will need to undo the corruption of the legal and education sectors, and great swathes of the economy.

American democracy would take more blows under a vengeful and aggressive Trump administration, but their institutions have demonstrated their resilience.

As Joseph Nye, elder statesmen of American foreign policy and longtime Kennedy School dean, recently told the Financial Times: “Have I ever seen a period as bad as this? …yes, the 1960s were worse. We had major assassinations, cities on fire, two failed presidencies [Nixon and Johnson].” Nye added the reminder that, during the protests over Vietnam, a bomb was placed in his building at Harvard, and that he would much rather be living today than to return to that turbulent era.

In Canada, we need not fear the end of democracy. But we should fight hard to prevent a similar, slow undermining. Moves like Saskatchewan’s effort to bring conservative politics into the classroom, or Alberta’s attempt to seize partisan control of the health care sector, may appear laughable. But they are clearly attacks on democracy, however small.

Poilievre’s troubling view of the civil service as partisan, his promise to take over the Bank of Canada, his attacks on the media and judiciary reveal a very wobbly understanding of the essential values of democracy. Let’s hope that in the next election, every other party underlines its commitment to democratic values and determination to defend them against any opponent.

A strong democracy depends on it.

Policy Contributing Writer Robin V. Sears is a longtime political strategist and international crisis communications expert.