The contrasting recent election outcomes a month apart in India and the United Kingdom tell a complicated story. As I pointed out mischievously on social media, “ab ki baar 400 paar” happened — but not in the country whose Prime Minister predicted it. It was Britain’s Labour Party that crossed that formidable threshold to record its most impressive win at the expense of the Conservatives, while in India the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which had brashly run on that slogan, lost its majority and is now dependent on allies to have a government. In both elections, the voters had a decisive say in cutting the pretensions of ruling parties down to size.
By the end of this year more than 60 countries, with some four billion people, will have held national elections, and pundits are at a loss to discern any common patterns among them. The broad narrative of 2023 was that of “democratic deconsolidation”: governments around the world were seen as becoming more authoritarian, less respectful of individual and media freedoms, more unfriendly to autonomous institutions and less restrained by checks and balances on their power.
What Samuel Huntington had described as the “third wave” of democracy — the heady global expansion of democratic governance that took place around the world from the end of the Second World War to the conclusion of the Cold War — had ebbed over the past decade and a half. Freedom House, the American think-tank that studies the state of democracies, announced that global freedom declined for the 17th consecutive year in 2023. The organisation’s annual report cited everything from coups against elected leaders in Africa to assaults on journalists in a number of countries (including India).
Follow highlights from the U.K. election results
Results that are reassuring
Freedom House was not alone. The Economist’s Democracy Index told a similar story, while Sweden-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), claimed that “across every region of the world, democracy has continued to contract”. And yet, voters in India — which Sweden’s Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, had downgraded to an “electoral autocracy” — surprised the doomsayers by cutting autocrats down to size, while those in the United Kingdom and France confirmed that the health of the oldest democracies remained robust.
Thanks to its two-phase electoral system, France produced a mixed result in its parliamentary elections, making a xenophobic far-right party its largest in the first phase and then producing a “hung Parliament” in the second phase, failing to give any of the three main party coalitions a majority to form a government. Tactical arrangements by the left and the centrist forces to prevent a right-wing government by withdrawing candidates in the second phase so that the strongest non-rightist might win each seat, ensured a very different outcome in the second phase from the first.
There is much to be said for an electoral system that brings the self-correcting mechanisms of democracy so visibly alive by insisting that voters are entitled to be represented by someone who commands 51% of the electorate in his or her constituency. But the democracy that invented the term “cohabitation”, to reflect the uneasy co-existence of a President and a Prime Minister from opposing political groups, was now left scratching its head as to the nature of the government that would follow.
The spotlight on America
The nation that claims to be the very oldest of modern democracies, the United States, worries observers for other reasons as it heads into a presidential election in four months with an unappealing choice that I had prefigured in this column a year ago. That the world’s richest and most advanced country must choose between a septuagenarian felon (who tried to orchestrate a revolt against the last election results) and an octogenarian whose incoherent debate performance has raised serious questions about his mental decline — a contest cruelly described as “dementia versus the demented” – is depressing enough. But a new poll says that Republican voters are now more sympathetic to the rebels who stormed the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, with over a third of Americans saying Joe Biden’s 2020 election win was not legitimate, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
What does this say about the health of democracy in the U.S.? Could another disputed election result provoke violence in the streets again?
Interestingly, it is the newer democracies of the non-western world whose elections this year have given more cause for democratic reassurance. Bangladesh, Bhutan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Senegal, South Korea, India, South Africa and Mexico (in chronological order) have held elections which many feared would lead to uncertain outcomes and prolonged disputes. Yet, all have concluded peacefully and largely uneventfully, and all except one have witnessed a transition to either a new ruler or a new governing arrangement. The one exception is Bangladesh, where Sheikh Hasina has returned to office after an election boycotted by the principal Opposition party.
Pakistan does not figure in this list because of the undemocratic circumstances in which its election took place, with the principal contender jailed and his party outlawed, candidates representing him winning as Independents, allegations of ballot-rigging made even by election officials, and the military overtly calling the shots behind a hapless civilian government. If more countries’ elections were like Pakistan’s, global fears of a “democratic recession” would indeed be borne out.
A Pew poll
Still, for all the good electoral news, a Pew poll in 24 countries found support for “representative democracy” sliding, with some 59% respondents “dissatisfied with how their democracy is functioning”, three-quarters of those polled feeling that elected officials “don’t care” what they think, and mounting support for alternatives to democratic rule: “In 13 countries,” noted Pew, “a quarter or more of those surveyed think a system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts is a good form of government.”
As columnist Ishaan Tharoor (in the interests of full disclosure, this writer’s son) wrote in The Washington Post earlier this year, “In society after society, illiberal values and politicians who embrace them are gaining ground. Numerous elected governments seem bent on undermining core tenets of the democratic project, from the freedom of the press to the independence of institutions such as the judiciary to the ability of opposition parties to fairly compete against the ruling establishment.”
Democracy’s future is far from assured.
Shashi Tharoor is the fourth-term Lok Sabha Member of Parliament (Congress) for Thiruvananthapuram, a former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and the Sahitya Akademi award-winning author of 25 books, including ‘Pax Indica: India and the world of the 21st Century’
