To say this, of course, risks being labeled partisan since President Biden is making the preservation of democracy a central issue in the 2024 election, as he underscored during his trip to Europe last week honoring the anniversary of D-Day. Meanwhile, Donald Trump regularly praises the effectiveness of repressive regimes from Russia, China, Hungary and even North Korea. Their leaders are “at the top of their game, whether you like it or not,” the former president said late last month.
But it should not be viewed as partisan to describe what is at issue in an election, and in my conversations with Europeans over the past few weeks, I was struck that so many — of various political inclinations — were acutely aware of how different the world would look and how much trouble democracy would face if Trump were victorious. Outside the ranks of supporters of far-right parties, there are few Trumpists in Europe.
In one sense, this transatlantic disconnect is not shocking. In most democratic nations, voters typically cast ballots in response to workaday domestic concerns — prices, housing, employment, health care, crime and immigration. For a fair share of the U.S. electorate, “defending democracy” is a rather abstract issue.
If you live in Europe, on the other hand, American food prices or the future of Obamacare make little difference to your life, but how a U.S. election outcome might affect global alliances matters. So does whether American influence and power will be deployed against the threats posed by Russia’s aggression, in Ukraine and elsewhere.
There’s another reason for Europe’s relative sensitivity to the democracy question: Dictatorship is a relatively recent reality there in a way it has never been in the United States. Consider not only the experience of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s and early 1940s, but also the relatively recent transition to democracy in Spain and Portugal in the 1970s or in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of Soviet occupation.
My go-to formulation about this moment’s political choices comes not from a political philosopher but from folk singer Joni Mitchell, who declared that “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” In Europe, the cost of losing democracy is a vivid memory.
My fear is that it’s not vivid enough. Europeans and American alike are losing their appreciation for democracy — because it’s old hat, or because democratic governments are seen as failing to solve problems, or because politicians are viewed as serving the interests of one elite or another.
In the United States, Gallup found that confidence in the way democracy is working fell from a high of 61 percent in 1984 to 28 percent in late 2023. An Ipsos poll taken around the same time found majorities or pluralities declaring their dissatisfaction with the way democracy was working in Poland, France, Britain, Italy and Croatia, as well as the United States. Among the countries polled, only in Sweden did a majority express satisfaction with democracy.
Champions of democracy might thus look outside the wealthy nations of the North and West for reminders of democracy’s capacity to give voters opportunities to express their desire for change, to speak up against social and economic exclusion, to hold governments accountable — and to defend democracy itself.
Recent weeks offered two heartening examples of the value of free elections and how they empower those without wealth or privilege to make their voices heard.
In India, voters denied Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party a majority after Modi — and most polls — predicted he would win a landslide victory. The rebuke came from poorer Indian voters who felt left out of the country’s prosperity and from those who feared that Modi’s Hindu nationalism would lead to constitutional changes disadvantaging Muslims as well as lower-caste Hindus.
In South Africa, the African National Congress lost its majority for the first time since inclusive elections were instituted in 1994 after the end of apartheid. On Thursday, President Cyril Ramaphosa responded to the rebuke by calling for a national unity government.
On their own, neither these elections nor European worries about a Trump presidency are enough to transform democracy into a voting issue this year. But Americans would do well to pay attention to how friends of democracy around the globe will interpret the choice we make. They’re warning us that flirting with authoritarianism never turns out well.
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