Why COVID is bad for global democracy

Autocrats and their mimics are having a good pandemic. There has been plenty of debate about which kind of political system has handled the virus better. As Swampians may recall, I side with Francis Fukuyama, who awards that distinction to competent governments in countries where public trust is high. They could be democratic (New Zealand) or moderately authoritarian (Singapore). By contrast, populist governments are almost uniformly flaming out (Britain, the United States, Israel, Brazil, India, and Mexico, to name a few).

What has been less well observed — at least in the western media — is the degree to which the world, in general, has become more authoritarian during 2020. The pandemic has given strongmen and would-be strongmen ample pretext to suppress free speech, scapegoat minorities, suspend elections and impose specious emergency measures on civil society. It is worth reading Freedom House’s aptly-titled new report on this topic, “Democracy under lockdown”. It finds that the condition of democracy and human rights has deteriorated in 80 countries because of Covid-19. Moreover, it expects these problems to get worse over the next three to five years. 

As has always happened in history during pandemics, minorities are acutely vulnerable. Many of the most notorious European pogroms occurred in the early stages of the Black Death. In many countries, Muslims have been targeted as superspreaders. In Sri Lanka. Muslim families have been denied the right to bury relatives who have died from COVID — they are forcibly cremated. This is in spite of the fact that epidemiologists say such fears are groundless. In India, Narendra Modi has done nothing to quell widespread Hindu nationalist tropes blaming the already besieged Muslim minority for the contagion.

Modi is also further cracking down on the role of non-governmental organizations. Amnesty International this week announced it was quitting India after its accounts were frozen. As my colleague Amy Kazmin writes, a new law restricting foreign NGOs from giving money to Indian ones could spell the death knell for thousands of Indian civic groups, which provide some check on the country’s increasingly monolithic politics.

In China, of course, the state’s already vice-like grip on the Xinjiang region’s beleaguered Uighurs has also tightened since January. In her farewell piece as the Washington Post’s Beijing correspondent, my former colleague Anna Fifield compares her recent visit to Xinjiang to walking through the set of The Truman Show. When she arrived in China, people were generally still prepared to talk to a foreign journalist, she says. Now she may be risking their freedom even to approach them. “Before I left, an old acquaintance told me about a joke going around China these days: ‘We used to think North Korea was our past — now we realize it’s our future’,” she writes.

Those who read the papers have some idea of what is happening in India, Turkey, China, and Brazil. They may also know that Hong Kong — which effectively lost its one country, two systems guarantees this summer — postponed its legislative elections until next year on coronavirus grounds. Similar justifications are being peddled in many less well-covered countries. I hadn’t realized, for example, that Burundi held an election earlier this year with no foreign observers since they were required to quarantine for 14 days, or that Ethiopia has put off elections until next year. The Freedom House report is full of such examples. It also has some good ones where “partly free” countries, notably Georgia and Tunisia, have stuck to transparent medical guidelines. It is bad enough to suffer from public health lockdown. But the mask should not be turned into a muzzle. People especially need to be heard when governments are imposing justifiable restrictions. 

Rana, the US is one of the 80 countries listed by Freedom House (for an increase in police violence and media restrictions). It also highlights Donald Trump’s dark evangelism for voter suppression. I much enjoyed live blogging this week’s presidential debate with you and Peter Spiegel, the FT’s US managing editor, although “enjoyed” may be the wrong word for it. The spectacle made me feel unsanitary. My question to you is: are you as worried about what could go wrong in November like everyone else?

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