The state of democracy after a year of elections
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Welcome to the London School of Economics for this hybrid event. My name is Neil Lee. I'm a professor of economic geography at the LSE. I'm delighted to be welcoming you here today.

We're focused tonight on a very important topic, one of the most important topics. As we know, this year has been one of the biggest years in democratic history with nearly half of the population of the world in countries which have gone to the polls.

The LSE throughout the year has been running a series of LSE research and commentary to help us understand and highlight the key academic contribution we can make across this field. We've been seeking to understand the outcomes and implications of what's been happening. As part of that, you can watch short films, blogs,

articles and other things to catch up on what's been happening as part of the year of democracy, as it's sometimes been called. Those of you in the room, you should have a link on bookmarks that have been handed out in the theatre tonight. For those of you online, there will be shared in the chat a link which will take you through to the website where all of this material is available.

So what we're going to do today is we're going to start off by giving you a flavour of this activity. We're going to start off by showing you a short film which is representative of the LSE's work in this area. It's a bit depressing to see Indonesia regress from a presidency of someone who had a great track record as a local mayor, as governor of Jakarta, who seemed to represent a more progressive, more inclusive kind of Indonesian politics, and

and to see an old bad boy from the 1990s with a terrible track record as the likely next president of the country. - Violence permeates the politics, and it means that life for people living in those areas where this is particularly intense is absolutely impossible.

We have seen the resurgence of agency, the agency of the people. Even though you have prevalence of political authoritarianism and lack of representative government, ultimately the future of the Middle East will be determined by everyday people. Now if this battle continues, then India is going to remain a democracy literally only in NATO.

The Christians believe that God saved Trump. People are greatly inspired, or at least the Christian elements of his faith. So Ghana is like the last reference to get their coaching from its current institutions in the subcontinent. If we see far-right parties getting into government, winning more seats in the European Parliament, this would have far-reaching consequences for Europe and for the world.

I strongly advise you to go and have a look at the videos on that series and the other commentary which is available. But to bring it closer to home, we have four of the stars of the series here today, because this is the last event in the Global Politics Lecture Series. So I'm delighted to introduce a panel of LSE experts, all of whom are featured in videos or other events over the course of the year.

So I introduce first of all Victor Agburga, an LSE fellow in the Department of Government, researching political behaviour in party politics in Africa around key issues such as climate change and gender, and star of one of our most recent video explainers on the election in Ghana.

Mookalika Banerjee is a professor in social anthropology and was an inaugural director of the LSE South Asia Centre. Her books include Cultivating Democracy, Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India and Why India Votes. She's just launched a new podcast series, The India Briefing, to continue her work keeping us up to date on Indian politics. Sara Hobolt is the Sutherland Chair in European Institutions and Professor in the Department of Government at LSE. She's Chair of the European Election Studies Programme

an EU-wide project studying voters, parties, candidates and the media in European parliamentary elections. She spoke at the LSE Festival in June on these topics, midway through the year and just after the EU elections and the momentous French elections. And Peter Trubovic is Professor of International Relations and Director of the Fielden US Centre at the LSE. He's a frequent commentator in the media on US politics and he has an admirably concise biography actually there.

So the format today, each speaker is going to have seven minutes to discuss, share their reflections on the elections. Afterwards, we're going to have a bit of discussion about some of the themes, try and draw some sort of commonalities about what we've been talking about. And then we'll open up to questions from the audience.

For those of you who are on Twitter, the hashtag for today's event is #LSEEvents. Presumably it's the same hashtag on Blue Sky or whatever other social media outlet you're using. This event is being recorded and will hopefully be made available as a podcast. My notes here say, "Ominously subject to no technical difficulties." Hopefully it should be available. If you're an online audience, welcome. You can submit your questions via the Q&A feature at the top left of your screen.

When you're submitting these questions, please let us know your name and affiliation. And for those of you who are in the theatre, I'll let you know when we open the floor for questions. Again, when you're thinking through your questions, name and affiliation is important as well. Now, we're going to give everyone seven minutes, as I said, and we're going to go roughly on the order of the elections this year. So, Mika Luka, first of all, then Sarah, Peter, and then Victor. Thank you very much.

Good evening, everyone. This is a room of nerds, no doubt. I mean, we are people who clearly are following elections so closely. We have absolutely nothing better to do on a December evening than think even more about elections. But it's deeply appreciated that you're here. And with my colleagues, we hope to make sense of this year, really.

But before we get into more broad thematic issues, I thought it would be worth just reminding us, because we're starting east to west, as you can see, we're starting with Asia, not least because it's also where a number of the early elections were held. So...

This was the order in which obviously more than these elections were held, you know, more than 50 elections were held this year. But I've picked out just a few which I could say something about that significance, both to that national context, but also more broadly to elections in general and the politics of democracy, really.

If you just start with Taiwan first, right? There is, we know, just to remind us of what happened, the Democratic Progressive Party won. The turnout rate was slightly lower than before. First time since 2000 that the winning candidate won less than 50% of the vote.

And it was also the first time a party won more than two consecutive presidential elections since direct elections were introduced in 1996. It had all kinds of ramifications for the South China Sea politics and what is going to happen with Horde or indeed other kinds of alignments in the region and beyond. And we will, once we've heard from all the different contexts, we can come back to the

what the national politics of Taiwan, for instance, does to those dynamics. The second one that caught our attention, of course, was Bangladesh. Here it was an election that quite clearly

Without exception, everyone thought it was not a free and fair election. Sheikh Hasina's Awami League won again. And then there were consequences in August 2024. And just to say that at the end, once we've looked at all the context, I have one more slide at the end where I just want to reflect on some of the...

reflections on what electoral politics has had for democratic politics after elections.

And in looking at some of these national contexts that held their elections quite early in the year, by December, a lot has happened in these countries since those elections took place, Bangladesh being a very important example of that, as some of you who follow Bangladesh politics will know. But the one-line summary of that is that Sheikh Hasina had to go into hiding. She had to leave.

in August 2024 when there was a huge demonstration student uprising that went on for weeks and finally ended at the point at which it ended 300 people had been killed and these were largely there were lots of people Bangladeshis protesting but it was dominated by students we should remember that and the army refused to fire on them

So the Sheikh Hasina lost her legitimacy even with her own army and therefore had to flee the country. So there are, and the protests were really as much triggered by the unfair and unfree nature of the election as indeed by the authoritarian regime that Sheikh Hasina had overseen in Bangladesh for the last decade.

In February, we saw Indonesia, where Prabowo won by the highest margin ever. There is, you heard my colleague John Seidel talk in that film, it was a sense of pessimism that there was

continuation of status quo, there was very little change, even though actors had changed, the interest groups in charge of Indonesian politics had remained by and large the same, and this was really an arrangement put in place by Widodo, who was the incumbent, whose only reason he couldn't run again was because of a constitutional term limit rather than a real change of power.

Next up we had Pakistan, which again is a context in which what happened in the election again one that we really have to, I think this is the moment at the end of the year, to think about what we are calling elections.

how much do they diverge from what we think a free and fair election is. That elections are not, just because they look like an election and smell like an election doesn't make them a free and fair election. And Pakistan was a very good case. If you jail opposition leaders,

and bar them from contesting politics. Is that democratic politics? Is that a fair election? Probably not. And the consequences of that, again, are playing out as they are in the others. And then, of course, South Korea, which has been in the news very much in the last 10 days, had-- this was very much a midterm evaluation for President Yoon. These were parliamentary elections. The opposition won.

And I put in this bit about the green onions. Does anyone know the green onion reference to South Korea? So one of the things on the campaign that President Yoon went into a grocery store, and there's been a huge problem with inflation and food prices everywhere in the world.

and he apparently picked up a bunch of green onions and said, "That's a perfectly reasonable price. What are you complaining about?" It turns out it was one of those yellow sticker green onions which had been marked down three times and that wasn't the normal price of green onions. Green onions became the emblem of the opposition and they carried it to rallies and so on. There are lots of wonderful stories. I'm an anthropologist. I take the symbolic and the aesthetic frills, so to speak, of politics very seriously because they communicate meaning.

In India, which I study very closely, Modi's BJP won a third term despite its initial boast that they were going to gain a supermajority. They didn't. Not only did they not get a supermajority, they failed to get a majority and they've had to form a government-in-coalition coalition.

and so they need alliance partners. Again, in India, which, because I've been studying it for 20 years, I know that it's been exemplary in its conduct of elections. In the past, it's been a lodestar of free and fair elections. In the past, in very challenging circumstances. Increasingly,

There are big questions being raised about the probity of the process. And these are of huge concern of the electoral process itself. The state of media freedom is very, very seriously bad. And opposition parties have been stymied, for instance, before the June 2024 elections in March, their bank accounts were frozen. So all kinds of plays are being made with media

not creating a level playing field. And again, I think we should ask these questions about whether they really are elections in the way that we would like them to be. And then I think finally Sri Lanka, which to my mind has been a very interesting election, not least because the kind of party that won is the one that I would vote for if I was a Sri Lankan voter. The prime minister is an anthropologist.

with a PhD. It was great. It happened at the start of the academic year as I was welcoming undergraduates to the department saying, career prospects? Well, thank you. Here's another one. But...

It was the end of this oppressive regime by the Rajapaksa family, the brothers, the uncles and so on, who had been in power. And then there's this two years of chaos which then finally led to the national people's power winning. They came out of university politics and opposition and union politics which has created not only an opposition in government

but also the possibility of reimagining how you negotiate a national economy in an international context, given globalization and multilateral organizations and their stranglehold on large parts of the global south are such a key issue.

Sri Lanka's response to these in the first few months of government have been very interesting and one to follow. So I promised you some big questions. One is I hear listening and reading the international do I have 30 seconds? Yes. Only 30 seconds. Only 30 seconds. We hear about

a lot of, oh, there's been a lot of anti-incumbency. Well, there isn't really a pattern of anti-incumbency, as you've seen from the few examples I gave you. Some cases, incumbents, when they have won, they've had narrower margins, like Modi in India. There is an overall concern, I think a very serious concern, about elections not being free and fair. Turnouts have been largely high

and in places like India I know have been growing election on election, but it's also to my mind, I think there is no room for complacency because

If people begin to feel they're voting in an election that is essentially unfair, we cannot take turnouts for granted. If people feel that it is not a fair contest, they might not participate. The future of left-right politics is up, and I won't elaborate that because I don't have time, but I'm sure we'll come back to that when we discuss, especially once we've looked at US and Europe.

In talking about elections alongside democratic cultures of what kind of democracies we want, where media freedom, civil society activity and political opposition are absolutely key to holding sensible elections and fair elections, if these take a nosedive as they have done, then it is room to worry.

I will, as I have been briefed by the excellent team organizing this event, end on a note of hope.

South Korea has shown, as Sri Lanka has shown, as Georgia is showing, there are a number of different contexts in which if people are able to organize and show up in large numbers, you can challenge the status quo. You can even challenge a democratically elected government. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you.

I'm very pleased to have up next, representing Europe, I guess, Professor Sarah Hobart. So I'm glad I'm having people pizza with America to show that it's not only America who can have a populist leaders, you know.

and you think, oh, it's also exciting across the pond, but I'm going to say, look at what we have here. So the one big story I want to tell about European elections-- and we've had one big set of elections in June in the European Parliament, as well as a number of individual elections-- is really the rise of the populist right.

And that has had a number of consequences. We now have the populist right in government, in countries like Hungary with Orban, Wilders is not in government but his party is in the Netherlands, Maloney in.

Italy, Slovakia and so on. We've also had populist parties overturning governments like Le Pen, who just managed, not only managed to bring about an election in France, untimely legislative election, but also toppled our very own Mr Brexit, Barnier, who was here at this stage not long ago.

who had the shortest term ever as French Prime Minister because of the populist right and populist left. I'm told I'm not allowed to dance around. And of course, we've had something we don't necessarily expect

And you remember saying, namely, an election being annulled due to a far-right populist, namely, Giorgescu there in Romania, which we were meant to have had the second round of the presidential election. And instead, that was annulled due to Mr. TikTok here coming first. And that was seen as by the constitutional court as partly due to election interference, not least from Russia. So it's really kind of uncharted territory.

But it's not a new phenomenon. One of the reasons what happened in 2000 this year is so important is because it's really a part of a general trend. It's not a blip. What we've seen, if we compare, go back to 1993, is really a sustained rise of populist parties, but here I've divided them into populist parties on the left and on the right, and you can see the increase is really all on the right, going from about 13% overall to about a

a third of the votes, legislative vote in Europe. So it's quite a significant force. And that means, of course, that we, that really means something for the parliament. We have put also, as you can see, in the European Parliament election, in a number of countries, populist right-wing parties came first, in France, Belgium, Italy, Hungary, Austria, and so on. So really, it's not a sort of marginal force on the fringes.

And that means, as I already said, that we have a number of these populist right parties now in government. Again, shaping what happens in the European Union and, of course, shaping what happens in individual member states. The light blue there are where there are minority forces in the government, but a dark blue is in the number of countries we see Slovakia, Hungary, Italy, see them as the majority party, the plurality party in government.

Now, just a few words about what that might mean in terms of looking forward to next year. What is this sort of sweeping, not sort of radical sweeping, but continuous rise of radical right-wing populism mean in terms of policy and in terms of more systemic consequences? So in policy, there's kind of two main things that the populist right have in common. One is they tend to be more Eurosceptic, although thanks to Brexit, not necessarily exit Eurosceptic. In other words, they look at Britain and go like, maybe.

Maybe we want to change the EU from within. But certainly skeptical about future more cohesive uniform action.

And that's really important because as we'll hear next, there's going to be a new president. I don't want to sort of steal your thunder. There's going to be a new president in the United States who, of course, has very different views on multilateralism. So that creates a kind of impetus for the EU to do something on security and defence. But because of the populist right, you don't really have a kind of one uniform view of that and you have a very weak outlook.

government in Germany, you have no government in France really and that has consequences. Another big thing is of course the anti-immigration agenda that these populist right parties have in common. On the systemic issues,

Two main things. One is really it has meant a fragmentation of party politics in Europe. We have more parties, we have more volatile voters, we have more parties in the populist right in particular, and that means you have just much more volatile governments. Governments have a hard time forming and they have a particularly hard time surviving. As we've seen now with Germany and France, Netherlands, you also have a quite volatile coalition and so on. And

And so that means you just have much less stable government in Europe than you used to. The other big question, and I was also sort of hinted at already, is what does that mean for democracy? And that's a kind of question that we don't quite know yet. But what we know is that the populist right tends to be not anti-democracy.

anti-democratic. They're not saying, oh, let's have a coup and just cancel parliament sort of South Korean style. Instead, what they're saying is, we're not so keen on the sort of liberal democratic constraints in our power. We don't really like independent courts or monarchy

or minority rights and those kind of constraints. So liberal democracy might potentially be under threat, certainly when we see, if we use Hungary, which is of course the one country in Europe that has a sustained time of a populist right party in power, that's really what we've seen. Slow and gradual democratic backsliding when it comes to liberal democratic institutions. So I'll end it there, thank you.

Fantastic. Thank you. Next up, Peter. Okay, I think I'll try to do this sitting down. It's great to be here with everyone. So I think I'll make three points at the outset about the U.S. election. One, concerning the scope of Trump's victory, because I think there's some confusion about this. Secondly,

a word about whether Trump 2.0 is just gonna be another version of Trump 1.0. And then thirdly, maybe a word about the international implications of Trump's victory for democracy. So the first thing to say, I think, about Trump's victory is that it was impressive.

Trump basically won across, you know, improved on his 2020, you know, election performance on virtually every demographic, which is saying a lot because if you think about it, on January 7th, 2021, he was basically counted out as dead. So this is somebody that

has come back and come back in an impressive form. I think the only demographic where Trump underperformed 2020 was among college educated voters, which only goes to show we only know so much. As important and as impressive as his victory was,

It was not the landslide that Donald Trump claims and that many of his supporters claim. It pales by comparison to true landslides in American history. Whether we're talking about Ronald Reagan's victory in 1984 or Lyndon Johnson's victory in 1964,

or Franklin Delano Roosevelt's landslide election in 1936. In each of those cases, the president won over 60% of the vote. It's huge and just swamped the opponent in the electoral college. Donald Trump did not win a majority of the American voters. In fact, he'll probably win all the votes are finally counted

For some reason, California, which is ahead on many things, is slow on counting votes and there's recounts and so forth, will probably have beaten Harris somewhere between 1.5 and 1.6 percent, making it one of the closest elections in American history. In fact, if she had picked up 230,000 votes in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Michigan,

we would be talking about a Harris presidency and not a Trump presidency. So I think all of that is important. I think just maybe to add to that, he will not, he does not or did not have very long coattails in the election. I mean, the Republicans managed to take the Senate and pick up enough seats to take the Senate. The Democrats were running against very strong headwinds there.

and you manage to hold on to the House with a two-seat majority, but they're essentially, Trump is going to be working with a very slim majority in the Senate and the House. And so it will make it difficult for him to get programmatic legislation through. I'm not saying he won't, but he'll have some rough sledding. Having said all that,

None of this means that Donald Trump's presidency won't be consequential. It will be. Those people who think that they've seen this movie before, I don't think so. I think Trump 2.0 is going to be significantly different. And the reason I think that is because the checks that were in place

in his first term are not there this time. I mean for starters, he basically owns the Republican Party at this point. The Democrats are in disarray trying to decide who among them is responsible for Harris' defeat. So there's a lot of infighting and fragmentation right now in the Democratic Party.

Add to that, I think, that Donald Trump understands the machinery of government this time in a way that was not true in his first term.

In his first term, he was a little bit like, when he won the election, it was a little bit like the dog that finally caught the bus. And there was a lot of chaos and so forth. There'll be some chaos in this administration too, just because of his mercurial nature. But I think it's very clear that people working closely with Trump

have a very clear agenda. He has a clear agenda. Immigration reform, for example, that's a kind of very benign version of I think what he has in mind, or retribution in terms of political enemies. I mean, that is all on the agenda.

And I think that he, given the appointments that he's making for key positions, and especially when I think of, if you think of the Pentagon or you think of justice or you think of intelligence, these are the three most coercive departments of any state. He's putting loyalists in each of those positions.

And then I think the final thing to just point out here is the Supreme Court essentially gave the president a fair degree of immunity over the summer. So he's in a position to really kind of push the boundaries of, I think, executive power and presidential prerogative. And I think the nominees suggest that he will. One final point, if I can.

Trump's victory is going to have real knock-on effects. Most of the conversation, and I engage in this myself, is on the policy side, like what does it mean for Europe, what does it mean for Asia, what does it mean for America's alliances, and so forth. And all of that I think is extremely important, but I think what gets lost in all of this is the political consequences, and I think they're going to be most important

most directly felt in Europe. I mean, his victory is being celebrated by the far-right parties that Sarah just spoke about. Orban declared it just the next day as history is now accelerating. Many see this as

as a kind of a pathway and a vision of the future. And I think at a time when centrists in Europe are really on the back foot and are playing on the political defensive, I think this is just going to...

strengthen, solidify the rights performance in states from Germany to France and beyond in a sense that what having Donald Trump reelected, you know, legitimates, I think,

the authority and the power of the right. So I think there's serious knock-on consequences. I'll try to say something more hopeful when I get a couple more minutes. So Victor, I was hoping you could say something hopeful. Yeah, sorry about my voice. I'm recovering from a cold.

So oftentimes when we talk about the health of democracy around the world, or even the issue of democratic backsliding, the African continent is often omitted in discussion. And one of the reasons is because a number of people consider the continent as in the teething stage when it comes to democracy. So what can we learn from this young generation?

democracy in the first place. So when we talk about the backsliding, we're assuming that it has already been consolidated and now we're worried about the retreat of democracy. So a number of people might say it is not relevant for a democracy that is just beginning, learning how to work, less concentrated on the ones already working, already running, and now being paralysed.

But that's a little bit far from the truth because the continent is constituted by a variety of democracies. We have some going by the Freedom House Index, for instance. We have some who are totally free, like Ghana or Botswana. The majority of the democracies on the continent are partly free.

And then of course we have the military junta, the authoritarian state and even the absolute monarchies. So there's a bit of variety around the continent, so we shouldn't just lump everything as a new democracy, very little to learn. As a matter of fact, we have come to discover that a number of African democracies actually have lots of features similar with their counterparts in Europe and in America.

A very good example is Ghana. Just last weekend, the Ghanaians went to the polls to elect a new president and a new parliament. And in an uncanny similarity with the US, a sitting vice president was contesting against a former president. There are no prizes for guessing who won. Well, the former president won.

Ghana, by the way, is not an outlier here. Botswana had an election, I think, in late October or early November. And the country experienced its first electoral turnover since independence. And Botswana is also a free country by the Freedom House Index. So this is a very good performance. Then we have a number of other countries in there.

Partly free category like Senegal. Earlier this year we also had an electoral turnover with the new president, one of the youngest in the continent. And the parliament just flipped about a month ago as well, so the opposition won.

There are some other countries where the ruling party won with a smaller majority. South Africa is a very good example. The ANC, aka Mandela's party, had their smallest majority since post-apartheid. And they couldn't even constitute a government. They had to run into a coalition to form a government. On a more cherry note, Namibia now has a female president. That just happened last month. So take down the US. Now an African country has...

female president. And this is not even the first time an African country is producing a female president. Liberia did it decades ago. So to show you that neglecting the continent when it comes to democratic discourse is a big oversight. And one more thing I would like to say is about what's the common denominator here? What's the string tying voters together? Not just on the African continent but around the world.

And the word, according to Trump, is groceries. Groceries is the word. And by groceries, I mean the prices of basic goods and services. And the simple question, simple but very effective, that the opposition often ask people while they're preparing to go to the polls is that, are you better off now than you were four years ago? And for most people around the world, the answer is no. And that question is often very effective in kicking out the incumbents and voting for the opposition.

Now the question is, now you've won the mandates, your position has won, and is it going to be an easy ride to

answering the clamor of the people. And this is going to be quite difficult because a number of African democracies are heavily indebted, including Ghana. Ghana at the moment is running about the World Bank and the IMF looking for bailouts here and there. Now the new president has inherited a hugely indebted country. So what is the way forward? I do not know. But with great power comes great responsibility. So elections are good. They show that people are able to register their distrust, their

this enchantment with the ruling power and are able to change fire and fire according to how they feel. Now for those given the mandate, it is just the beginning of the story. So what are you going to do with this mandate? Once again, I think...

We should go back to the basics of groceries. So democracy was big bread because this is what the people are prioritizing. So to claim to be a responsive government, to claim to be a government by consent, you have to prioritize the number one priorities of the people, which is once again groceries. So thank you very much.

Thank you. So I'm going to pick up on a few of these themes and sort of try and synthesize what we've been talking about. I'll ask you questions, which I hope will sort of, you know, synthesize some of this. So actually, I'm quite interested in this notion of, I mean, Victor, you mentioned the sort of diversity of places in Africa. And of course, it's not just Africa, it's everywhere. And yet I get a feeling there was a sort of commonality in terms of sort of

in terms of the things which were sort of driving that. So I guess my first question is, what is driving these sort of trends? Given that we're seeing these trends occurring in very diverse places, but this sort of trend towards populism seems like it is not universal, but across much of the world, what's driving that? So that's my first question. The second question I'll put out is actually something which... In Sarah's presentation, you talk about liberal institutions.

and the sort of institutions of liberal democracy. Actually, this came out of both Peter and Magluka's presentations as well. So my question is, are these strong enough to survive another set of elections like we've just had? And will we see them evolve in the future and change into something else? Who wants to go first? Go ahead, Sarah. I'll do it.

Well, I think what I was... Just to make it a bit more fun, I'll slightly challenge this narrative that has come, I think, partly also in response to the US, and you picked up on it, ooh, it's all inflation. And I think studying Europe, not to say that... I mean, economic voting is a thing, it's always been a thing, but if you really want to understand the rise of population, you can't sort of narrowly look at, oh, you know, there's been an increase in, you know, people feel they're worse off economically. I think it's just in Europe...

the story is just not that simple. And one of the things the radical right has done in Europe is just very successfully turn elections much more into identity politics, so that a lot of voters who are actually very well off in countries where

they're not particularly, including inflation is not a problem. They feel that they are actually terribly badly off because they have sort of status anxiety. They feel their countries are being taken over by immigrants, cultural change.

you know, woke people doing all sorts of things that are terrible. So that's a lot of the narrative. That's not to say that's not, but sort of just saying, oh, because the assumption would then be, you know, oh, if we get inflation right and people are a bit better off in their pocket, oh, everything would return...

to the way it was. And I think in Europe, in fact, we've seen in many countries where it's not really, it's not economics primarily, although it can spread that drives a lot of this. I think there's a bigger story about cultural threat and anxieties and sort of status anxiety much more related to this sort of identity politics. So this is sort of my slight challenge to the narrative that, oh, we can explain all of this by one factor, and that's inflation. Okay, please say that, Michael. Um...

Well, I'll just come in right on the back of Sarah's point. I mean, I think if you, in the US case,

There are proximate causes to explain Trump's election. And so I think inflation is like one of them and immigration is another. And wokeism, I mean, he spent $35 million on one ad shown over and over and over again to Trump voters to make sure that they came out on transgender issues.

And so, you know, I mean, he tapped that and he's tapping a concern that existed, I think, principally inside, you know, the Republican Party, but maybe among some independents as well. Having said all that, I think in the American case, Trump's election the first time and as well this time reflects a sense that the United States is...

fundamentally been on the wrong track. That it has embraced kind of open economies, institutionalized cooperation, multilateral governance, and there is a backlash against this. I mean, I've spent time researching and writing about this. And so I think there's a kind of deeper resentment and grievance that to Trump's credit,

He was probably, you know, Sanders and Trump were probably the first two major politicians to identify. But Trump has not provided a solution. Putting up tariff walls will not address that problem.

you know, or immigration walls. I mean, the United States has a problem with immigration, but the problems really have to do with simultaneously exposing Americans to more market risk

and shrinking the size of the welfare state in the United States and reducing social protection and economic security. I think this is also a story in Europe, so it's not just a particularly American story, but I think Trump found a way to really tap into that. Okay, so let me...

- Push back, oh, I agree, but also say it more startly. I think there is, to answer your question, Neil, there is a real, if we want to talk about a crisis of liberal democracy, is there a problem, what's going wrong? First thing, this kind of comparison shows that, say, you take any of these things in different parts of the world, there are different factors.

But one thing which is probably common, I see across contexts, is the democratic project in the way that we imagine it, whether you call it liberal democracy or a modified version of liberal democracy, there's been a huge amount of complacency about it. We've taken institutions for granted, we've taken participation for granted, we've taken electoral processes for granted.

as opposed to the other side, which has worked incredibly hard. So every populist project, whether it is the Republicans in the US, whether it is the right-wing parties in Europe, I mean, if you look at the people who actually study this stuff,

The amount of time, money and effort that goes into creating narratives through social media or reaching out to people, there is a huge amount of work that has gone into that political agenda. As opposed to a lack of what I would call a cultivation, a huge amount of complacency on the other side, that somehow all of this was going to last forever.

And I agree with you, Sarah, that there are economic factors. But for instance, in India, the most, I don't know whether the term populist quite works in the same way, but the people who vote for that kind of right-wing politics are actually the wealthiest in India. So it's not, and this is to a certain extent true in Europe as well.

The second thing about U.S. democracy, and I wrote this in my blog piece for the U.S. Center blog, is that the hypocrisy, you know, what the note you ended on, the hypocrisy of U.S.-style liberal democracy is that...

these misadventures of the United States abroad, which Trump voters and Trump, as you were saying, quite rightly said, you know, why the hell are we going and fighting wars and these guys can sort out their problems for themselves? Why are we supporting NATO and putting so much money into Europe? They can deal with their own problems.

There is, again, you know, A, there has been a political commitment to building a certain kind of world order, which is, you know, that's the good side. The bad side is the U.S. has meddled in a lot of different democratic elections and other politics all over the world. That's coming home to roost.

And finally, I think there was a third point I was going to make about, yes, about the populism, if I may. That, you know, this in Europe and sitting here and, you know, working in Britain, one is so aware that

that part of this both US and Europe discourse on immigration is, and it's anti-wokery or whatever that's, you know, is actually, what does it stand for? A historical reckoning with its past, which refuses to happen. And if you refuse to reckon with the past that Europe and the United States has with the rest of the world,

You can create a hate narrative about immigrants, as if, you know, they're people, why are they here? Well, you don't know why they're here because you don't know how your histories are intertwined. And if you don't make that education, people grow up in Britain routinely not learning about the empire.

So if you're going to raise that kind of population, they're going to say, oh, you know, why are these people coming? Why are people crossing the Mediterranean? Well, you blew up Libya where there was an economy and you just created a whole range of refugees. You meddled in Syria in particular ways, which has created waves of immigration. Where else are people going to go? So the fact that these two things are linked, I think,

the LSE, you know, liberals of any color, if we see this, we have to work much, much harder in being able to communicate this and educate and take people, you know, in part, make part of the conversation if we really want to move the needle on issues like immigration. Thank you. Peter.

Yes, a quick response. I think the world is often demarcated into a materialist world and a post-materialist world. So the developing country, for instance, Africa, is still struggling with survivalist issues like grocery prices, house rent, health care. Why Western democracies largely dealt with these issues so they can aspire towards more loftier goals like inclusivity,

and things like that. But that demarcation is also a very forced demarcation because ask people in Europe, ask people in the US, choose just one issue that informs your voting pattern. So there are myriads of issues and these are interconnected, we accept. But if you choose one, which would you pick? Trans rights or the cost of groceries? And the overwhelming majority, if you ask me, would go for the economic one.

economic issues. This was actually done in the US and the majority went for grocery prices. So I think we shouldn't, I'm not saying that post-materialist issues are not salient. They are there. But I think we should be well fed first before we can aspire towards these loftier issues. Because even populists make these dual arguments of both the cultural and then the economic. And if the economy is bad it often gives them like a

a justifiable point, a good alibi to talk about. So I think it's very necessary not to neglect and say, "Oh, we're largely done with those things like grocery prices. Now we're talking about should we create extra bathrooms?"

a quick point on that as well. Do you know that the Ghanaian election was also an LGBTQ election? Well, this is an African democracy. Do not expect to hear things about LGBTQ. But both candidates, both in the ruling party and the opposition party, were talking about LGBTQ issues because the legislation was passed not too long ago criminalizing the

same-sex relationship. And then it was very politicized because the president did not sign it into law. So this is an African democracy which is meant to be materialist, but now people go, the major contestants were going to churches and mocks talking about LGBTQ issues.

So if you go through that very clear demarcation about materialist and post-materialist, you wouldn't expect to hear gender, sexuality issue in a Ghanaian election. So these dichotomies should be a little bit more nuanced and complicated and intricately linked. But I have said probably predominantly Western democracies are talking about inclusivity and rights, why African democracies are still grappling with these survivalist issues. But there are lots of interconnections there and it's

There's a resurgence of class-based, economic-based consent. I think that's my response.

So I want to sort of come back to this point about our institutions, actually. And so one thing which struck me about sort of some of your discussions now is two things. First of all is our political parties. And it strikes me that sometimes, yeah, I'm not a political scientist, but, you know, some of the sort of culture type things feel like they're often stressed by the left and some of the sort of economic stuff stressed by the right. And it feels to me, there's a question to me about whether that's the response...

that's one of the challenges which has been leading to our sort of the type of elections we've been having, the type of results we've been seeing. And the second thing is about the sort of institutions and whether, you know, let me ask a very broad question, which is whether you think this has been a, has this been a year which is going to challenge our institutions or has it been a year which has shown that they are resilient to challenge? So who wants to go first? Can I ask Sarah to go first? I think...

I think it's not a sort of immediate collapse of democracy in Europe that's on the cards. I think it's sort of slightly more subtle than that. First of all, if you ask people in Europe, you know, do you favor democracy? I mean, overwhelmingly, people are like, yes, we love democracy, it's great. So it's really about the sort of notion of democracy you have.

The populist right will say they are the real democrats, they believe in the will of the people and only they who can really represent the will of the people, it's normally them. And I mean that's the core populism, it's this idea that you have this evil corrupt elite versus the pure people and the populists say oh look at all these others, they are the ones that don't really serve your interest, we are going to serve your interest.

And so that's why they favor direct democracy and also why they're opposed to constraints on democratic institutions. So I think the challenge is really in terms of when they then come into government, will they try? And we don't have yet so many examples of the populist right in post-war, after democratization, where the populist right has been majority party for a long time. But of course, the one example we have, which is Hungary, is that's exactly what we've seen.

We've seen an attack on the free press. We've seen an attack on the independent judiciary. We've seen an attack on institutions. You know, they kicked out a whole university. You know, so these are the sort of things. They don't say, oh, let's cancel elections. In fact, autocrats love elections. And it's a big literature now. No, they don't. It's much more sort of insidious than that. And then I think comes the question of democratic norms. And what we see is that while people love democracy, they don't necessarily have a...

good understanding of this thing we talk about with liberal democracy. So when we ask people, you know, I run this survey in all EU countries, or would you, you know, would you like a strong leader who, you know, maybe go against parliament to get things done? People are like, oh yeah, we'll have a bit of that. And in particular...

young people. So what we see is that young people are much more likely to not be supportive of liberal democratic institutions like parliamentary constraint and executive like independent judiciaries. That's a little bit concerning when you have that in conjunction with political leaders who clearly don't have these strong norms and maybe also exactly like you said there's not we've not really educated people say oh why is it important to have

independent judges. Like in this country, when it happened, you had the Daily Mail running, you know, the Supreme Court judges on the front page saying traitors. Because what? They're going against the will of the people. And that's exactly that we're undermining. See, they're not democratic. We're democratic. So we shouldn't have these institutions that are not majoritarian. So I think that's the long-term concern. I think that this...

It is a time, I think, from what you're saying and what we've seen this year, is that there is a conflation somehow of democracy being equated with the will of the people, which is, in other words, majoritarianism. It's about numbers. So the whole point of having a liberal democracy, which was about systems of managing representation, and that's why the health of a good democracy is measured by how well you treat its minorities, for instance.

Is one that has got lost in this conversation? Why is it that nobody is undermining the will of the people, but the will of the people has to be expressed in certain ways? And we could see it during the Brexit referendum in this country, where it became the problem with having referendums on anything that big.

is that it becomes only about numbers. The 49 versus 51, that's it. There is no system of representation. There is no way of sampling. There's no way of creating. Otherwise, why do you bother with constituencies and MPs and proportionality and all the mechanisms of an election that create that representation? That gets thrown out of the window. It's just sheer numbers that we are talking about. So any institution that comes in the way of...

managing that representative system is uh is seen to be somehow standing in the way of the thing i did want to see something about your left right thing but you want us to come back no i want to do left right that's good left right isn't it an irony that you're sitting in the lsc

and we associate the right with economy and the left with culture. But that's also not right empirically in Europe, it's the other way around. Sorry. You rightly provoked us. It worked. If anything, left-wing politics would force us to think in quite material terms about where's the money, who controls it, but I know exactly what you're saying. And I think, again, this is one of the problems of...

what we call culture or wokeism, you know, what you said about LGBTQ rights was so interesting because it's not about transgender rights, it's not about minority rights, it is the fact that you're willing to create a civil society in which people have rights equally.

And that's a liberal project. So it's not about being for this issue. It's not a cultural issue. It's a juridical rights issue that you highlight by giving examples, for instance, of transgender rights, saying everybody should have the same rights. But the fact that this is a rights discourse gets lost in somehow calling it legal.

which is a fuzzy term and we're standing for things that only three people agree on and the elites may be bothered. We're worried about much more serious things. And that ad that Peter was referring to was exactly about them. It's worth repeating, Peter. You were very coy in not repeating it.

She works for they. I work for you. That's what Trump said. That was the ad. I thought everybody knew. Everybody's puzzled with all these issues. I should have had a slide. I should have had a slide. I wasn't targeted. You were micro-targeted as a potential Republican voter.

So Peter, do you want to come in and then Victor? And you're allowed to critique my basic knowledge of political science as well. No, no, I mean actually there's a debate inside the Democratic Party right now about whether the party has been too focused on

you know, DEI cultural issues and whether it needs to get back to kind of meat and potato economic issues. I mean, in a way, it doesn't fully track because so much of what Biden did while he was in office was focused on economic issues.

But nevertheless, it's a debate because partly the question is, why did they lose? Did they lose because they had lost the cultural issue to the Republicans? Or did they lose because of anti-incumbency effect? Did they lose because of groceries, of inflation? I mean...

If 70% of the country thinks you're on the wrong track, which is what 70% of the electorate thought the United States was on the wrong track, you don't get reelected or you don't hold on to power in the United States. There's no example. I mean, the fact that Harris got as close as she did is quite remarkable, actually.

given those kinds of headwinds. I wanted to pick up though on the question about will the institutions hold? I hope. I think they will be tested and they're being tested now. So Trump's call for recess appointments. It's one of the constitution you can make, you can appoint cabinet officials for up to a year

If the Senate and the House are in recess, this provision is in there because back in the day, it was hard for everybody to be, you know, get back from their state, you know, like on a horse and a buggy to get to get to Washington, D.C.

So there's the possibility, I think there's pushback in the Senate, but it is unclear right now whether or not Trump will go for recess appointments. So to fill controversial cabinet positions, whether it's the Secretary of Defense or the head of intelligence, without Senate, proper Senate advice and consent. Okay, so that's one thing.

Another is the question that Trump raised both during the campaign and subsequently about whether the military would be used to effectively to make good on his commitment to deport illegal immigrants abroad.

That is not normally how the military is used in the United States. So this is pushing up against the kind of constitutional, the institutional boundaries. And I think just finally there's the question of what will happen

to individual agencies in departments. I mean, they seem, he seems, you know, this is the whole project 2025 and the idea of, you know, removing, letting go, firing large numbers of civil servants that work in key departments.

You know, I don't know whether or not they'll go down this path. I mean, there's certainly a lot of talk about it. Elon Musk is being put in a position where he'll be able to wring out some inefficiencies in the government, meaning individuals. There's talk about cutting $2 trillion from the operating budget of the U.S. government. That's one-third of the budget.

You know, I mean, if they go down this path, and this is just the last point, and here's maybe, you know, kind of a silver lining, is this constitutes, you know, this is likely to be viewed by most Americans as overreach.

as going too far, especially those people that are waiting on paychecks from the government and so forth, you know, Medicare or, you know, whatever. If you really... If you were really to make good on these campaign pledges, there could very well be a backlash against the administration. Thank you. We'll go to Victor and then we'll open the floor for... Yes, about surveys and in public opinion about institutions.

So there has been an Afrobarometer survey, so Afrobarometer yearly survey across the continent about entrusting democratic institutions. And the majority of them support democracy. But there's also a worrying support for strongman as well, as Elia mentioned. And then, this is very interesting, a number of people said that they are, yes, they support democracy, but they are ready to tolerate a non-democratic regime that responses faster to their needs. So if you think democracy is not delivered enough,

they might consider looking elsewhere, and that's worrying. So there's a lot of pressure on democracies on the continent to actually deliver, to put things on the table, unless they might vote as might hope, or people might look elsewhere. There can't be evidence for this already. The coups we had earlier this year, late last year, like in Mali, in Guinea, we saw people going out on the streets and jubilating when a democratically elected government was overturned.

And the reason for jubilation was just that this government is not responding enough to demands. And I think the military or whoever was coming would respond faster. So I think the challenge is people like government by consent, people like participating in government. But I think we should not just rest there and say, oh, it's a government by consent, it's a democratic government. We're better than the other people who do not do elections. I think elections come with expectations. So after elections, governments have to deliver.

So retain the trust of the people that put them there, essentially. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. Like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or, can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, back to the event. Thank you. So now we've got time for questions from the audience in the room and online. We've got a few online questions. We'll start off in the room. So just a reminder when you're asking, well, when you're asking your questions, please make sure it is a question rather than a sort of biography. But if you could state your name and affiliation as well. I think if we'll take the woman in the white top here, it should be where you need to wait for the microphone. Yeah.

Keep your hands up, I need to choose some more. The gentleman at the back in the scarf. I'm Jess, I'm currently studying politics A level. I wanted to ask, what do you think the correlation is between the rise of technology and social media and the rise of populism? That's a great question. At the back. Thank you, my name is Kirill. I'm from MSc Political Science and Global Politics in LSE.

I would love to ask what do you think, so there was a lot of talk about institutions, but do you think that really all this rise of right-wing populism could break the institutions eventually? In a sense that, for example, there is this

this example of Italian Prime Minister who campaigned on a very right-wing agenda, but she is now much more pro-European and pro-Ukrainian, for example, than she claimed before election. So the question is whether when they came to power, they would be not so dangerous and whether they will be able to break the institutions. Thank you. Okay, so will populist Mello want to empower? And then should we take one online as well at this stage? Yes, sir.

So we've got one from David Walter, and it's, how will BRICS impact on emerging democracies in the global south? How will... Sorry, I didn't hear it. As in B-R-I-C-S. BRICS. Oh, BRICS. BRICS economies. OK. Right. Shall we start off with Mika Lika? Is that OK? Yeah. I can also... You know, it's interesting that just last month, the summit, the BRICS summit...

Despite the change, there is something really shifting. A lot of people in Asia feel this, say this, all the time write about it, that somehow there is the era, the 20th century era of Europe and America is on the decline. There are new alliances, and if you look at the alliance between China and Russia and India, at the moment, strong men, all of them,

A whole set of multilateral institutions that the Bretton Woods ones, World Bank, IMF, others that have set the terms of global engagement are now going to be replaced by an alternative set of institutions.

And there is a real palpable sense, and it's a worrying sense, that the day of liberal democracy in the way that it was practiced and the rules-based order is over. There is now a new world order that is going to be set by strong men. There's not a single woman there who will create a different scenario. And what's happened in Syria, of course, is going to impact

role in all of this. As I was saying earlier, Taiwan and its politics and what happens with China, because this is the less of the pro-China parties that won in Taiwan, all of these, they're shifting alliances, but the need to create a different set of institutions and narratives that go against the ones that have

dominated global politics and the global economy is a very palpable desire that is articulated. Just maybe respond to one thing about technology and social media and the rise of populism, that question, the first one, I think, was in India, you know, there is just last month we had a talk at LSE by a writer who wrote a book on H-pop, which is Hindutva pop.

which is Hindutva is the right-wing Hindu majoritarian ideology in India that dominates politics now. It's the deep state. I mean, we're talking about institutions. You don't want to necessarily destroy institutions. You just populate institutions with loyalists of ideological loyalists. So you keep them, but they have to be people who draw the line of an ideological agenda that is anti-minority, that is...

And the use of technology, and it's not just technology and it's not just social media and Twitter, there is a whole political economy and industry of technology.

publishers, retailers, distributors, artists, musicians, who are creating a genre of music whose lyrics are as hate-filled as you can imagine. And this is what plays at weddings and political rallies and demonstrations. So it is in the subliminal subconsciousness of everybody. And when the talk was given, the scale of it staggered everybody.

And last month, again, or just this month, I think, a new government was sworn in in Maharashtra, which is one of the biggest states in India, which is where Bombay is, a city many of you might know, Mumbai. And at the inauguration of the chief minister of this large province, which is the larger than a European nation,

H-pop was the soundtrack on stage. So it's no longer subversive. So it's not just the trolls on social media. It's not just the misinformation. It is the actual pushing through affect

and aesthetics that is appealing to people. That is the real danger. And when I was saying about the lack of cultivation, this whole liberal democratic project, we actually, what we don't have, Martha Nussbaum has a fantastic book on this called Political Emotions, in which she says you need emotions with politics. Emotions stabilize political ideas, she says.

And I do think often that for the Liberal Project, what are the emotions of the Liberal Project? Where are people willing to fight for justice or minority rights in a way that they're persuaded through poetry and music and charismatic figures? So, yeah. Thank you. Sarah, who has to go next? On social media and the rise of populism, thanks for that.

for that question. I think in a European context, the main thing it does, it lowers the barriers to entry because Western Europe in particular have had very long, stable parties and it's very hard to break through. And what you can do, for example, I mean, the TikTok, our George Esco candidate, who then was a null, but he's a good example. He wasn't even invited to the presidential debates on stage in the sort of mainstream media. And how did he win? And a lot of that, I mean, of course, he might have had a little...

help his friend in Moscow. But other than that, I mean, it was on social media. I think, you know, there's still a lot of research to be done on it, but another evidence of it is in terms of the demographics of who votes for the radical right. So we used to have this

sort of saying in Europe that it was the radical right voter was white, male and stale. So white, male and old. But now for the first time in these European Parliament elections, it was more likely that younger voters, particularly younger men, would vote for the radical right and older generations. And one thought behind that is that they were targeted and sort of persuaded partly through social media and the sort of influences there. And the gender gap is in fact much larger

in the younger generation, so it's really young men rather than young women. So that's a great question. Just on what happens when they're in power, you mentioned the example of Meloni. So I think Meloni, of course, it's been welcomed on the European states that she's been so anti-Putin, and there's a split in the radical right in Europe whether they're pro-Putin or anti-Putin.

But I think just because you're anti-Putin, that doesn't mean you were sort of turned left-wing. That's one particular view which has been very important in an EU setting, supporting sanctions against Russia. But if you look at a lot of what she does with immigration and minority rights within Italy, I think a lot of her policy agenda still stands. Thank you, Peter. I'm particularly interested in your view, if I can, on will Trump mellow in office? Yeah.

I think I might know it. Well, I thought it was, yes. I was actually going to focus on Maloney. And I'm not sure I heard the BRICS question. It's like, what's going to happen to the BRICS? Their impact on emerging democracies in the global south. Okay. All right. So first on the social media, I mean, I would just kind of echo Maloney.

I think the points that have been made here in the American context, it's pretty clear from this election, Republicans understand it, Democrats don't. And they need to pick up their game to be able to deal with the Republicans. This was very clear, it seems, in reaching young male voters, in particular in the U.S. They really drove that vote, the Republicans did.

Will Trump mellow or populist? I mean, in the case of Maloney, I would just say, I think the interesting thing here is that

Maloney was dealing with Biden as the president. So, you know, with the U.S. being led by a liberal internationalist that believes in international institutions and alliances. And so in a sense, I think Maloney was kind of pulled in part by the U.S. position with Trump.

she won't have that same kind of pressure point from the United States. So she will, in fact, perhaps have more room to maneuver with respect to her, you know, I mean, she's more inclined to feed her political base in the U.S. and, I mean, in Italy and feel less inclined or in the need to kind of navigate the shoals. The only thing I would say in opposition to what I just said is,

Given the lack of leadership in major European states, she could end up being the leading force in the EU. So she's got some interesting decisions to make. The one thing I would say on Trump, there's one thing that is a check on Donald Trump, and that's the market.

He is very sensitive to the market and I think it helps explain why he picked somebody like Scott Besson to be Secretary of Treasury. This is not some

I mean, Besson actually used to work for George Soros. You know, that's kind of like this inside the right wing of the Republican Party. He picked somebody who has a lot of credibility on Wall Street and in global markets. I mean, Donald Trump pays attention to how the market behaves. So if the market responds really negatively to

to tariffs and to his imposition of tariffs, I think he'll back off. If it responds negatively to the talk about, let's say, gutting Medicare, I mean Medicaid, I'm not sure that it will, but if it does, he'll back off.

he'll back off. So I think the one thing that could mellow Trump is the market. The last thing to just say on the BRICS, as I don't think it's just, I think the BRICS are in for a bit of a, if Trump makes good on his tariffs with respect to China, I think the BRICS are in for a bit of a surprise, countries in the global south.

Already there is pushback in Brazil and in Chile, in other countries, about the Chinese dumping their goods in those markets. If the Chinese cannot sell to the United States, they're going to try to sell to Europe. And if Europe is going to say no, they're going to go to the Global South. They have an overcapacity problem, and they won't solve it through domestic consumption.

So the only way out is to export. And you've got to have somebody take those exports. Fantastic. Victor? Addressing that question as well, the BRICS question. I think the majority of the members of the BRICS have this non-interference policy. So whether you're a democracy or not, whether you conduct elections or not, we do not interfere. We help you as a fellow global south partner to build your bridges. So whether it's South Sudan or Ghana, they...

about the structure of the government. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? I think it's kind of both because on the one hand, countries tend to enjoy the sovereignty of lack of interference and nobody breathing down your neck or telling you what to do.

But the flip side, then there are no guardrails. And in case you need a loan or something from an international institution, you can just go to China or to Russia and then you get it without any conditionalities. As opposed to going to a Western institution and then within you the criteria on whether you care to set in human rights violations or not. And there's a very good example for this, by the way, in Ghana.

Back to the LGBTQ issue. The president dragged his feet and is still dragging his feet in signing the LGBTQ law because the country is heavily indebted and they need loans from the World Bank and the IMF. So it can be on the one hand crushing the rights of some people and on the other hand going to Western institutions and asking for money.

So imagine China gives you that money or Russia gives you that money, then there'll be no problem signing a legislation criminalizing same-sex marriage. So I think the guardrails are necessary and it will have an effect on the institutions, democratic institutions on the continent. Wonderful. Thank you. We've got time for a couple more questions if we're quick. So can we go first of all online?

- Yeah, so we've got, I'm gonna amalgamate two questions into one. So we've got a couple of alumni questions which are about the state of democracy and the voting system, about whether a country has first passed the post of proportional representation

Vijay Shrao says, "Are the political systems which employ first-past-the-post better at getting rid of politicians they don't like rather than, say, a country with PR?" And Maureen Gilbert, an alumna in Ireland, has given the example of Ireland with single transferable votes. Great. Thank you. If we take a gentleman here at the back with the green on. Yeah.

If you remember to introduce yourself as well, please. Thank you very much. My name is Tinashe. I'm a former LSE student. Thank you very much for this evening. Welcome back. I just have a general question which is to what extent are all these issues stemming from the 2008 financial crisis and our failure to deal with those issues when they emerged? Great. We'll take one from the gentleman there. This refers to this year.

Sorry, I'm retired from East Finchley and my son graduated in geography this year. Thank you. This year, 2024, what's going to happen next year in these countries who are going to take advantage of the fact that Trump is in power and they can start diluting democracy, knowing that they can get away with it? Okay. Diluting democracy.

Great. I think we probably relatively quick answers on these for you. I'll leave the PR questions to political scientists. I can have a conversation with the experts. Let me address the dilution question. India, which I study closely, has been diluting democracy steadily for the last 10 years. It hasn't needed Trump.

Narendra Modi has been a politician his entire career. Trump has just become a politician late in life. When there is an agenda that is about weakening institutions and there is an ideological project to recreate, reimagine the country as a different kind of entity than the one that its constitution mandates it to be, and you're as strong as Modi is and India is, I don't think it makes any difference.

The Trump transactionalism is something that obviously is going to affect foreign policy and indeed trade policy. And people will find their way in dealing, but it isn't, he's a known beast. So people have dealt with him before. And, you know, there's been a bromance between Trump and Modi in the past.

It's not going to be the same again if Trump carries through with what he said he would carry through on tariffs. And India will have to play a different game as a result. I really don't think, and this is a final wrap-up comment, I really don't think the standards of democracy in any country

have been maintained or diluted because of either the World Bank or the IMF loan conditions, or indeed the policemen of democracy that have come from Euro-America. Deals have been struck with a lot of non-democratic regimes.

A lot of democratically elected governments have been toppled because they've been inconvenient in Latin America, which we haven't spoken about much. And a shout out to Mexico, please. We haven't mentioned Mexico at all in this year of elections, which is phenomenal. We had a female president, right? Not many. So I really don't think that the dilution issue is linked to

Great. Sorry. Briefly on first-past-the-post versus PR, sometimes the Brits are like, oh, look at us. We don't have any radical right party. Let's ignore the 14% who voted for reform UK. Look at us. We're first-past-the-post. We're so great.

I mean, what tends to happen... So, of course, it's much harder for challenger parties to emerge in a first-past-the-post system. That's right. The barriers to entry are higher. But imagine you have a capture of one of the mainstream parties, let's say the centre-right party, like...

happens, then what you do-- and you can come in with 35% of the vote, like Labour, and have like 65% of the seats. And absolutely, in the case of the UK, no constitutional guardrails. So before we're sort of congratulating ourselves on the beauty of our electoral system. And that is not entirely impossible that that could happen in the UK as well. So I think, yes, it does stop the fragmentation.

of the party system, but it doesn't, it's not saying, oh, then you don't have the rise of populism necessarily, or that you don't have to capture one of the mainstream parties, often with much greater consequence than because they don't need to be in any kind of coalition, which they often do in a PR system. Peter? I'll focus on the 2008 crash question. So what I would say is that in Western democracies,

The anti-globalist backlash, anti-globalist populist backlash, really has roots that go back to the 1990s and the end of the Cold War and the turn to neoliberalism and especially its embrace of

by the center left. It was already being pushed by the center right. But in the 1990s, whether it was Clinton or Blair or Schroeder or Jospin, they all moved in that direction. But what I would say about 2008 is that that backlash that was already beginning to... I mean, you can see it in looking at...

polling data and other data sources, that backlash accelerated with the 2008 crash. The crash fueled it. And I think in large measure, it fueled it because leaders, successive leaders, if I just focus on the United States, whether they're Democratic,

or Republican, did not address the underlying grievances and resentments. And so it got larger and more potent. And Donald Trump figured out how to harness that, not to solve it, I don't think, you know, but to harness and to tap those grievances.

And that's the challenge, certainly that faces American leaders, but I think leaders in Europe and in democracies in Asia as well. Victor, you get a final word. Yeah, on the Trump effect on African democracies. So I think the BBC or the DW conducted like a random interview.

very close to the US election on the African continent. The number of countries, they found that there are lots of Trump fans actually on the continent. A number of people said they wanted him to be the president and if they were to vote, they would actually vote for Trump. And is there any institutional effect of this? I think one message it sends is that there is this liking for a strongman for some reason. Probably because they equate Trump with...

and quick action as opposed to the more deliberative, delayed democratic process. That could be one of the explanations. So when it comes to governance then, or what signal does it send to politicians themselves? And I think the world is watching, not just in Africa, but all around the world. And Trump just legitimized a number of things that they are planning to do on their own. A very good example is what happened during the George Floyd protest in 2020. So the protest and the response by the U.S. government.

A month or two after that protest, there was a similar protest in Nigeria, also about police brutality in Nigeria. And there was a very strong response by the government. Killed lots of innocent, peaceful protesters. And when the government was confronted, they referred to what happened in the U.S. Now look at what happened in the U.S. Look at what Trump did. And we're just replicating the same thing.

So this could just mean that the world is watching and when Trump missteps or does something wrong, we'll just point to Trump and say, if he's doing it and the US is like the beacon of democracy in the world, why can't we do the same? So I think, yes, the world is watching. I think that's what I would say. That's a great point to end it on.

Sort of. So this event concludes our Global Politics series for 2024. You can still watch the videos online and catch up with events you missed, including the festival earlier this year on the website. And I'm also taking this opportunity to announce the theme of next year's LSE Festival, which is going to be Visions for the Future.

It's going to take place between Monday the 16th and the Saturday the 21st of June. We'll be looking at worlds to come. How will AI, new technologies and innovation shape our societies? How will we confront the global challenges of climate change and inequality? And how, after a year of political upheaval and elections, how will our political reality change? So keep an eye out for further details on that.

And so just to bring it to a close, thank you very, very much for attending. Thank you very much to the LSE team for organising it. And most of all, thank you so much to our brilliant speakers. Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events podcast on your favourite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.uk forward slash events to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.