In a year of global elections, what did we learn about the state of democracy?
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It's All Things Considered from NPR News. I'm Scott Detrow. Over the past year, you have heard us talking again and again about high-stakes elections all around the world. Trump is now the country's president-elect. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has claimed victory. That the Venezuela election did not meet international standards. We talked about 2024 as a year of elections, with more than 4 billion people, about half the world's population, living in countries where major elections were taking place.

All of this happening in a moment when experts are worried democracy is at risk on a global scale.

2024's elections began in South Asia. Barely a week into the year, we had these results from Bangladesh. It's going from being essentially a multi-party democracy to becoming more of a one-party state. That wasn't the final word on Bangladesh's democracy for the year, and we'll have more on that in a moment. Meanwhile, a reformist won the presidency in Iran, and in India, the ruling party held onto power.

In Venezuela, the opposition candidate said he was forced to sign a letter admitting defeat, though the U.S. and other countries recognized him as the winner over Nicolas Maduro.

And in Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum made history as the country's first woman president, riding her predecessor's coattails into office. But in other parts of the world, incumbency was seen as a big negative to many voters looking to throw ruling parties and leaders out of office. Like in South Africa, where

where the ruling party lost support in a pivotal election. The historic result is a turning point for the party once led by Nelson Mandela. That global trend played out in the United States as well. Former President Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris, who had replaced the unpopular president, Joe Biden, on the Democratic ticket midsummer. Thank you very much. Wow. Thank you.

Consider this. Elections dominated the news in America this year, but we weren't alone. So what do this year's elections around the world say about the state of democracy at large? From NPR, I'm Scott Detrick.

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It's Consider This from NPR. As this extraordinary year of global elections draws to an end, experts continue to warn of democratic backsliding. And all of this leads to big questions about what comes next in this moment of populism and anger at incumbents and institutions.

We're going to start out by talking to some of the NPR correspondents who have had front row seats to these major elections. Dia Hadid, our South Asia correspondent, joins us from her base in Mumbai. Hey, Dia. Hi. And West Africa correspondent Emmanuel Akinwotu is on the line as well from Lagos. Hey, Emmanuel. Hey. We are also joined by John Otis, who covers Latin America for us as in Bogota. Hey, John. Hey, thanks. Good to be here.

Dia, I want to start with you because you began NPR's coverage of global elections this year from Asia in Bangladesh. Then you went on to cover India and Sri Lanka's elections. What struck you most from these elections that you covered?

What struck me most is how elections can be used as a fig leaf for autocracy and how that can backfire. An example of that is Bangladesh, where the elections were engineered to propel the former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina into power, but months later, tens of thousands of people overran her residence and they forced her to flee in a helicopter to neighbouring India. Yeah!

And now Bangladesh is under transitional rule led by the Nobel laureate, Muhammad Yunus. And the hope perhaps optimistic is that there'll be free and fair elections by the end of next year. That's such an interesting point that I feel like ties into a lot of the themes we've seen that at a certain point, you just can't stop a sentiment, a groundswell that of, of, of a push for change. Let's shift to India though. Uh,

another country with a lot of interesting cross-currents, which had elections this spring. Right. And it's the world's largest democracy. So nearly a billion people cast their ballots over six staggered weeks of voting. But it is a place where critics say that democracy is being eroded in a few ways. Perhaps one of the most important, according to critics, is

how the Hindu nationalist BJP has whipped up voters by scaremongering about Muslims, who happen to be India's largest minority. And that includes the Prime Minister himself, Narendra Modi, who suggested India's Muslim minority were infiltrators at a rally in April. And that diminishes the idea of them as equal citizens with equal rights.

We also had elections in Pakistan, Scott, and there we saw widespread allegations of vote rigging

And here's again, like one of these other major takeaways about the state of democracy in 2024 is that there was a sense among people that I was speaking to in South Asia that the United States isn't really paying even lip service to democratic ideals as it once used to. And think of Pakistan where the State Department did issue a statement noting that elections had included restrictions on assembly, association and expression.

But the next paragraph was that they'd work with the government that came to power. That brings me to John, because, John, I do feel like an exception to that has been how vocal the U.S. was demanding free and fair elections in Latin America. Though, as you reported this year in the election in Venezuela, it turned into a fiasco. Tell us what happened.

Yeah, it's pretty clear that the incumbent, Nicolás Maduro, stole the election. And it was really just an outright brazen electoral theft, probably the biggest I've seen in my many years covering this region. Voter tally sheets show that the opposition candidate, Edmundo González, he beat Maduro probably by a more than two to one margin. And yet on election night, Maduro comes out and without a shred of evidence or any data, he just claims victory.

And then after that, there were protests on the streets. So he unleashed a fierce crackdown, jailing protesters. And he forced Edmundo Gonzalez, the opposition candidate, to go into exile in Spain. And all of this happened.

Despite, as you mentioned, fierce U.S. pressure on the Maduro regime to hold a free election, and that pressure included economic sanctions. And in the aftermath, the U.S. called out Maduro for stealing the election. They recognized Gonzalez as the rightful president-elect.

But none of this really mattered. U.S. influence is waning in Latin America. And so far, Maduro has been able to survive U.S. sanctions thanks to help from authoritarian regimes in Russia and China. And right now he's consolidating his dictatorship.

That's an interesting theme between the two places you're both covering there. Emmanuel, I want to talk to you now about South Africa, because this was another interesting election this year. Ever since apartheid ended, the African National Congress has run the country. It's been one party rule with broad majorities. Voters turned on them this year. What happened?

There's a way in which you can look at the elections in South Africa as a kind of snapshot of a wider continental trend where, you know, incumbent parties like the ANC have lost ground. South Africa, like many African countries, has a young population struggling to envision a better future, angry with corruption, with unemployment, some of the highest unemployment in the world and failed promises.

I think what I was really struck by was just the emotional poignancy of really what the ANC was still able to summon, this profound liberation history that goes back to Nelson Mandela.

I remember being at ANC rallies in the final days of the campaign, including on Villa Casi Street where Nelson Mandela lived, and hearing these moving renditions really of liberation songs I'd only ever heard online. You know, feeling just as an outsider, just how powerful they still are, how moved people at the rally were.

At the same time, it just was so out of step, really, with so many of the conversations I'd had with young people in and around Johannesburg, who just felt they'd been really profoundly let down. There was a real anticipation about having a moment in South Africa where the ANC wouldn't be as powerful as they'd been before.

But people weren't really relishing that. You know, they were determined to kind of cast their ballots and to have an impact. But I feel there was also a lot of sadness just about the perceived failure of the ANC. And what I think I took from that and from other examples is just that whilst people were looking to show this disappointment with incumbents, it didn't mean that they were optimistic about the future. Actually, they were not very hopeful about what the future holds.

There are a lot of different trends that you're all flagging that are running in parallel throughout the world. And I want to talk about one of them right now. A little bit of what you were saying there, Emmanuel.

Voters are calling for alternatives all over the place. But in many places, status quo leaders or the ingrained political cultures are in one way or another throwing up roadblocks to those clear calls for change. Absolutely. If you look at Bangladesh, for instance, it's not just the ousted prime minister's party that struggled to respect democratic norms. It was the rival opposition party and from time to time the military. And we can see that play out, for instance, in Pakistan, Afghanistan.

India is a much stronger country. But certainly, it's not just about one actor. It's about a whole culture that understands the importance of a peaceful transfer of power. Yeah, you know, likewise in Venezuela. I mean, talk about ingrained political cultures. Maduro's Socialist Party, they've held power now for the past quarter century. Yeah.

And basically what they've done over that time is they've used the tools of democracy, I mean, like elections and referendums, to slowly chip away at democracy, to get rid of checks and balances. And now basically there is no more democracy and hopes for any kind of change are really fading. This feels so similar to what is happening in Nigeria, where I am, where the ruling party, the APC, who've been in power since 2015...

They began by being the first opposition party to win an election in this kind of era of democracy in Nigeria. And have since then essentially overseen progressively less elections

transparent elections and it feels as though so many things that are wrong with the political culture of Nigeria are as Dia says are kind of aligned into creating this just general obstacle for people to actually be able to kind of meaningfully achieve change or change the status quo.

That's Dia Hadid, Emmanuel Ekinwotu, and John Otis, three key people in our team of journalists covering the world. Thanks so much to all of you. Thank you. Thanks very much. Thanks, Paul. This episode was produced by Avery Keatley and Megan Lim with audio engineering by Valentina Rodriguez-Sanchez. It was edited by Adam Rainey and Vincent Nee. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.

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