Catch and Release

In most of the stories we’ve covered so far, democratic backsliding has been preceded by some rising anti-democratic movement or plotting by a democratically elected official. But, in this next case, authoritarianism fell upon Tunisia pretty quickly. After spurring on the Arab Spring, Tunisians lost the appetite for change, and rushed through setting up their government. This ultimately led to the quick demise of a once burgeoning democratic bastion.

Tunisia

In late 2010, a fruit salesman named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of a municipal office in Sidi Bouzid, where he lived. He was protesting the seizure of his fruit by the local authorities, who extorted salesmen like him for protection. In essence, he was demonstrating against the corruption in the Tunisian government. This message, as well as extremely jarring images, led to the Jasmine Revolution.

In less than a month, the government fell. After brutally repressing protesters to little effect and international condemnation, President Ben Ali finally came to the negotiating table. It was too little, too late. Not only did Tunisians succeed in toppling their own oppressive regime, they also started a broader movement for democracy in the Middle East and North Africa: The Arab Spring. (Source)

Tunisia was the best success story of this movement. By October 2011, the first democratic elections were held. Tunisia’s independent elections commission did impose some restrictions on how candidates could run, including how long they could advertise and what type of posters they could put out. So, it was as close to fair as they were going to get coming out of an autocracy. (Source)

Needless to say, there was some turmoil coming out of this election. Political instability, mostly relating to the past repression of Islamists, led to the ultimate creation of a compromise constitution in 2014. This constitution was actually relatively effective, and the first peaceful transfer of power occurred in 2019. I was even able to travel there and see the ruins of Carthage!

As you can imagine though, since we are talking about it in a democratic backsliding blog, this story indeed does not have a happy ending. Despite setting up an elections system for their legislature and executive branches, the Tunisian government never set up a Supreme Court to enforce the constitution. This was a loophole waiting to be exploited. In July 2021, President Saied moved to disband parliament and take control of the government. Using the popular cover of a stagnating economy and proclaiming that he could fix it, and by invoking a questionably applicable article of the Tunisian Constitution, he was able to take control relatively easily. (Source)

What can we learn from this tragedy? Well, discarding the populace’s prior experience with authoritarian status quo, the two main factors contributing to these events were economics and poorly constructed institutions. Similarly to in Poland and Russia, Saied was able to bend the rules to his will, exploiting the very democratic system to erode it from the inside. He was able to do this with few consequences because people are driven by their needs first. If an economy/economic system doesn’t work for them, they will push for change, just as in Turkey’s case. While the location has changed, the through lines are evident.

The Grand Finale

So, what’s all this been for? Am I just fascinated with global politics? Do I just want to speed up the onset of nihilism? Have I gone down the wrong internet rabbit hole? Yes, no, and… probably. But, there is a much more pressing reality which has presented itself. Our democracy (that’s right, here in the U.S.), is in danger. For the first time since democratic indicators were tracked by the think tank International IDEA, the U.S. has been listed as a “declining democracy”. A few factors have contributed to this decline, being a decline in effective parliament as well as the aftermath of the 2020 election.

The decline in the effectiveness of our legislature is evident. As the use of the filibuster has become more popular, the Senate has ground to a halt, finding it difficult to pass even the most basic of bills. This is thanks to political polarization, as each side’s willingness to compromise has completely drained. Not only do senators find it difficult to compromise in our polarized environment, but the need to cater to the base through obstructing the opposition has exacerbated this decline.

I would talk about the 2020 election, but I would rather not open that can of worms. Regardless of what side you’re on, we can agree that democracy is at stake. And the legislation aimed at restricting voting rights as a solution only serves to decrease participation and confidence in the system. (Source)

So, what can we do about it? First, we have to be cognizant of the warning signs. Be wary of strong men who claim to be able to fix everything, if only you give them enough tools. When economic downturns happen, be sure to watch for abuses of power. And when politicians try to lock the opposition out of competing, don’t let them. This leads to the second point: when you see democracy slipping from your grasp, and your rights fading away, don’t just sit and watch. Protest. Make your voice heard. Before it’s too late.

Thank you all for reading, and until next time, have a good one.

– Will Corvino

Of Tinted Waters

Skyrocketing inflation, a hostile takeover of the central bank, and a once-popular president clinging to power. Whereas Ataturk was the creator and perpetuator of modern, secular Turkey, “an autocrat so there would be no more autocrats”, Erdogan may be the reaper. Oppression and suppression are the name of the game, and a once burgeoning economic force is in freefall. A perversion of Ataturk’s vision for Turkey.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, tyrants revert to tyrants. Ukraine is the beginning and end of Russia’s, no, Putin’s ambitions. Restoring the former glory of the Soviet Union is his goal. A glory for him, but not the people. Political opponents can’t stand in his way. Power is a strong motivator. After the USSR collapsed, Russia made leaps and bounds towards democracy. But years of progress are sent down the drain by a spy and his oligarchs.

Turkey (History; Current Events)

Turkey is an interesting case. In the wake of WW1, the Ottoman empire collapsed completely, and after a messy period of warring governments, in 1923, Turkey declared itself a republic. In 1924, it declared itself secular. The first president, Kemal Ataturk, ruled like a tyrant. He suppressed opposition. The state fully controlled economic policy. They built up nationalism by controlling history textbooks. They fully abolished any form of religious government. Some of these things did lead to positive outcomes in the end. But the means were questionable. When he died, it took a couple of years, but eventually they became a democratic establishment, with opposition parties forming around 1946.

Since then, Turkey’s had a bit of a rocky ride. There was a military coup in 1960, followed by a constitutional rewrite. The Soviet Union attempted to meddle in their territorial claims, which caused the U.S. to back Turkey.

At the beginning of this century, the AKP began to rise to power. In 2002, after they swept parliamentary elections, they introduced a constitutional amendment to remove the eligibility for election of one Recep Erdogan. Erdogan and his AKP began undoing the secular policies which had been upheld since Ataturk. They did have Islamist roots, after all (of course, by which I mean that their party was tied to the religion of Islam). They were locked in a constant duel with secular opposition, but that wouldn’t last long.

In 2007, Turkish authorities uncovered weapons which were allegedly part of a plot to overthrow the government. They conducted incredibly “thorough” investigations, mostly relying on the testimony of military officers with known Islamist affiliations. All in all, nearly 300 people were convicted in 2013. Academics, journalists, military officers, everyone. All of the convictions were overturned in 2016, but the damage was already done. In the political moment produced by the trials, the AKP passed 26 amendments to the constitution, which both strengthened democracy to meet EU standards and also expanded executive power over the judiciary. A large amount of discontent brewed over these policies and extreme reactions to protests, which caused the AKP to fall short of a majority in parliament in 2015. However, because of Turkey’s coalition system, no government was able to form, since no parties which could unify into a majority banded together. This triggered a snap election in which the AKP regained their power and won easily.

At this point, Turkey is pretty bad: questionably cracking down on government officials, undoing societal norms for practically no reason, etc. But this was just the beginning. In 2016, there was a failed military coup, which allowed for Erdogan to seize the moment and strengthen his own political hand. He immediately blamed the opposition and used this public blame as an excuse to arrest tens of thousands and remove over 100,000 people from their job for alleged connections to the coup. Riding this wave, in 2017, voters narrowly approved another referendum yet again increasing the powers of the presidency (which is the position that Erdogan holds). It removed the coalition system and the position of Prime Minister, making the Presidency the main executive (which was convenient for Erdogan, because he was barred from holding the position of Prime Minister). In 2018, early elections were called, and, yet again, the AKP’s alliance won an outright majority and allowed Erdogan to further consolidate his control over the government.

Inconveniently though, political instability spurred an economic crisis. Fueled by populist economic policies, lack of market confidence, and tariffs, the Turkish lira lost a quarter of its value within a year. The central bank, then, to combat inflation, went to the universal inflation handbook and raised interest rates, which did help. Erdogan, however, has decided to do the opposite, meddling in the central bank’s operation to try and get them to lower interest rates so he could stay popular. This has caused Turkey’s economy to go further into crisis. Since 2020, the situation has gotten slightly better, with Erdogan loosening his grip on the economy and allowing macroeconomics to do its thing. But, he has since pivoted to other issues, such as introducing further restrictions on academic freedom.

Technically, Turkey is still a democracy. But, the consolidation of executive power, oppression of opposition, and attempting to produce artificial economic growth to fuel popularity don’t bode well. And in fact, I would argue that Turkey has already fallen past the point of no return.

Russia (Source)

On New Year’s Eve, 1999, an event happened that may have changed the course of modern history. A former KGB agent, Vladimir Putin, rose to the position of acting President from acting Prime Minister. In March of 2000, he removed the word “acting” from that title when he won the presidential election. The Russian people had no idea what they were getting themselves into.

Warning signs came early and often. Just a few months into his presidency, during military exercises, the Kursk submarine was sunk. All of the sailors died, 23 of whom died due to gross negligence from the government. Putin’s government attempted to cover it up by controlling the media and messing with the legal system. In 2002, a Chechen military group took control of the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow, holding 850 hostages. Instead of negotiating, Putin’s government released toxic gas into the theater. They killed all of the militants and 129 of the hostages. In 2006, famous journalist Anna Politkovskaya was found shot in her apartment. She covered the Second Chechen War and the Theater crisis. She was also the victim of a poisoning attempt in 2004, on the way to cover another crisis. It is unclear who ordered the attack, but you can probably guess who. I can go on. We can talk about his unprompted invasion of Crimea, the Belsan school siege, or the Georgian war. They all illustrate the same point.

Over time, Putin has become a lot bolder in his authoritarianism. While early on, he simply controlled the press and befriended oligarchs, he has now moved on to political suppression. In 2017, Boris Nemtsov was found shot dead outside the Kremlin. The government claimed it was a Chechen rebel (a very popular scapegoat), but due to Nemtsov’s opposition to Putin and attempts to expose Russian military machinations in Ukraine, I would suppose that Putin was at least indirectly responsible. In 2013, Alexei Navalny, a popular opposition figure, was jailed on phony embezzlement charges, barring him from running for office. Bolder still, Putin has begun cracking down on protests against his regime. Media is tightly controlled, and protesters are often detained. (Side note: while I was there touring, I was genuinely terrified that if I criticized the Kremlin something bad would happen to me. It’s that bad).

What is this all in service of? Well, in 2005, Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union the “major geopolitical disaster of the century”. And based on his KGB roots, it’s not hard to jump to the next line of logic. Putin has been strengthening his sphere of influence in former bloc companies, directly invading Crimea, ties to Belarus, troops in Georgia, etc. But there has always been one problem: NATO. NATO has been expanding eastward and eastward, even trying to integrate Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance. So why is Putin invading Ukraine? He wants to make the USSR great again (wink wink nod nod that’s a reference).

Conclusion

Sometimes, change comes slowly. These two countries have all the trappings of democracy, but political and economic suppression remove any possibilities of that. They both prove that democratic backsliding need not be immediate nor obvious. And you have to stop the avalanche before you get crushed.

That’s all for this week. Next time, we will be looking at a tale of rise and fall. Tunisia, the country that started the Arab Spring, and the only one to actually become a democracy in the end. The good times don’t always last though.

Thank you all for reading, and until next time, have a good one.

– Will Corvino

The Iron Curtain of Autocracy

On March 31st, 2020, the news website Balkan Insight declared Hungary “No Longer a Democracy” after the passage of a coronavirus emergency powers law which all but made Prime Minister Orban a dictator for the duration of the emergency. But the emergency never has to end. It can last this way, forever. The law, which is called the “Bill on Protection against Coronavirus”, has censorship clauses and limits the few remaining checks and balances against the Prime Minister. But how did it get this bad?

In February 2020, Poland passed a law allowing for members of the judiciary who criticized the government to be punished. They have advanced a significant number of laws banning LGBT people, abortion, and other miscellaneous rights. They continually undermine the rule of law and stack the courts in their favor. So much for Law and Justice (The direct translation of PiS’ name). How did a former Soviet Bloc country make so much progress, just for it all to be clawed back?

Hungary

Hungary’s shift to authoritarianism didn’t start in 2020. It started in 2010, when Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s party, Fidesz, were swept into power, with a supermajority of seats in parliament. Interestingly, they only won about 50% of the vote, but fractured voting blocs allowed them to be way overrepresented. They used their power to force through changes to the constitution and legal system to allow them to control the whole government. The biggest/most important changes that they made were removing checks on executive power by the legislature and courts, passing censorship laws and shutting down the free press, and limiting the mandate of the courts.

We’re going to glaze over executive power grabs, because they are significantly less important than the erosion of other checks here. Suppression of freedom of speech is one of the most dangerous lurches a country can take towards authoritarianism. If all the information about a government’s misdeeds are prevented from ever reaching the ears of the public, they can’t be voted out. And this is exactly what Orban has been doing. In 2016, an Orban ally became a partial owner of a leading opposition newspaper, and soon after, the newspaper (Nepszabadsag) was shut down. He consolidated his grip over the media further in 2018, with allies acquiring over 500 independent media outlets, shutting them down or converting them into propaganda outlets. Now, the reporting of almost all journalism in the country goes through the government’s hands, with reporting on “sensitive topics” being tightly controlled. And this brings us back to the coronavirus bill. Censorship is enshrined into law. Opposition perspectives have all but disappeared from the media landscape. Now who’s to report on government overreach? Only outside observers, who can do nothing but scream into the glass dome of Hungary’s information abyss.

The most insidious way that Orban has rigged the government in his favor is through the courts. In 2013, Orban ousted the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and narrowed the Court’s scope, preventing it from ruling on many cases. Not only that though, but the amendment passed in 2013 went further, allowing the new Chief Justice to select which judges would rule on each case (which is obviously problematic since the new appointed justice was loyal to Orban). It also restricted the definition of family to marriage, which completely prevented the court from upholding LGBT and other rights. The final trick Orban had up his sleeve, though, was in changing what rulings justices could cite in their decisions. In the new constitution, the justices are prevented from citing rulings issued prior to the passage of the new constitution in future rulings, essentially undoing decades of progress and development of the court system. I’m certainly not an originalist by any stretch, but this policy is just crazy.

Poland

Poland’s backsliding came in an almost identical way to Hungary’s. In 2015, the PiS (or Law and Justice) party was swept into power, much the same as Orban’s Fidesz party. They also got to work dismantling the system of government, especially with their changes to the Constitutional Tribunal Act, allowing the party to completely stack the courts in their favor. They instituted many of the same policies that Orban did, although with much more pushback.

The newest policy change of note (since most policies were almost identical to Hungary’s) is the censorship of the judiciary. They created a disciplinary mechanism for judges. Which, devoid of context, is a reasonable move. If judges exhibit inappropriate behavior, like obvious conflicts of interest, there should be a mechanism to remove them. Something that does not classify as inappropriate behavior, though, is criticizing the government. Allegedly, judges’ denunciation of the government’s meddling in the judiciary system discredited Poland. As if all the other actions and ridicule weren’t doing enough damage.

It hasn’t been all smooth sailing for Poland though. In 2020, after the Constitutional Tribunal effectively banned almost all abortions (Aside: 98% of abortions in Poland prior to this ruling were due to fetal defects, and that method was deemed unconstitutional), hundreds of thousands of protesters showed up at the nations capital and all over the country, despite bans on gatherings of more than 5 people due to COVID. Especially incensed were young Poles, who felt the ban symbolized more than just abortion laws. In a similar yet unrelated case, in late 2021, a woman in her 22nd week of pregnancy died of septic shock due to her fetus’ lack of amniotic fluid. Under the new abortion ban, doctors were legally prevented from conducting an abortion to save the woman’s life. This time, there weren’t all protests. There were vigils. There were some protests, not nearly to the same magnitude. I just hope that this doesn’t mean that the Polish people are starting to give up.

EU Response

The EU actually has very few options in these scenarios. The only real option is to invoke Article 7, a move that would strip a member of its voting power in the EU parliament. However, invoking this article would require all other members to unanimously vote in favor of the motion. And, for now, Hungary and Poland are protecting each other. The two countries even held up the EU’s seven-year economic plan in 2020 over a rule-of-law provision, betting that many EU members would rather crumble to autocrats over risking funding. What a joke.

Conclusion

While these two cases are very similar, they don’t provide a lot of lessons for the U.S.. In the U.S., we have a very robust court system, and scores of checks and balances. But so did Hungary and Poland. All it takes is one far-right leader to send a country tumbling over the edge.

That’s all for this week. Next time, we will investigate the slow, plotting takeovers of Turkey and Russia, and tell a rousing tale of economic inefficiency and fractured opposition.

Thank you all for reading, and until next time, have a good one.

-Will Corvino