There is some good news about the election.

The contrasting results of the recent elections, held a month apart in India and the UK, tell a complex story. As I mischievously pointed out on social media, the “400 percent victory” happened, but not in the country where the Prime Minister predicted it. It was the UK Labour Party that crossed that formidable line and recorded the most impressive victory, beating the Conservatives, while in India, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which campaigned on that slogan boldly, lost its majority and is now dependent on allies to stay in power. In both elections, voters had a crucial say in undercutting the ambitions of the ruling party.

More than 60 countries, with a population of around 4 billion, will hold national elections by the end of this year, but experts are puzzled by the lack of a common pattern across them. 2023 has been broadly described as the “breakdown of democracy,” with governments around the world becoming more authoritarian, less respectful of individual and media freedoms, less friendly to self-governing institutions, and less restrained by checks and balances on power.

What Samuel Huntington called the “third wave of democracy” — the spectacular global expansion of democratic rule that took place around the world from the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War — has been in decline over the past 15 years. Freedom House, a US think tank that studies the state of democracy, said 2023 marked the 17th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. The organization’s annual report cited everything from coups against elected leaders in Africa to attacks on journalists in many countries, including India.

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Reassuring results

Freedom House is not alone. The Economist’s Democracy Index reported similar results, and the Sweden-based Institute for International Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) claimed that “democracy continues to shrink in every region of the world.” But voters in India, which the Swedish Institute for Democracy and Diversity (V-Dem) downgraded to an “electoral dictatorship,” surprised the doomsayers by undermining the autocrat, while voters in the UK and France confirmed that the health of the oldest democracies remains robust.

France’s two-stage electoral system led to mixed results in the parliamentary elections: the first stage saw the xenophobic far-right parties emerge as the strongest, while the second stage saw a “hanging parliament” in which none of the three major coalitions won the majority needed to form a government. A tactical arrangement was made in the second stage to prevent a right-wing government by having the left and center withdraw their candidates, allowing the most powerful non-right parties to win every seat, resulting in a completely different outcome in the second stage from the first.

There are many benefits to an electoral system that so visibly realises the self-correcting mechanism of democracy by insisting that voters have the right to be represented by someone who represents 51% of the electorate in their constituency.But the democracy that coined the word “coexistence” to reflect the uneasy coexistence of a president and prime minister from rival political groups is now grappling with the nature of the government that will follow.

Focus on America

The United States, which calls itself the oldest modern democracy, is worrying observers for other reasons as it faces a presidential election in four months with an unattractive choice that I predicted in this column a year ago. The fact that the world’s richest and most developed country must choose between a septuagenarian felon (who plotted an insurrection against the results of the last election) and an octogenarian whose incoherent debate performance has raised serious questions about his mental decline (a matchup cruelly described as “dementia vs. dementia sufferer”) is depressing enough. But a new poll shows that Republicans are now sympathetic to the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, and that more than a third of Americans say Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory was not legitimate, despite all evidence to the contrary.

What does this say about the health of American democracy? Could another disputed election result spark renewed violence in the streets?

Interestingly, it is the newer democracies in non-Western countries that have provided more reassurance about democracy in this year’s elections. Bangladesh, Bhutan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Senegal, South Korea, India, South Africa and Mexico (in chronological order) held elections that many feared would lead to uncertain outcomes and protracted conflict. However, all ended peacefully and largely without incident, and all but one country saw a transition to new rulers or a new governance. The only exception was Bangladesh, where Sheikh Hasina returned to power after the main opposition boycotted the election.

Pakistan is not on this list because its elections were held under undemocratic circumstances, with its leading candidate jailed, its political party outlawed, its representative candidate elected unopposed, allegations of vote-rigging even raised by electoral authorities, and the military openly taking power behind the back of an ill-fated civilian government. If more countries’ elections turned out like Pakistan’s, global fears of “democracy in decline” would become a reality.

Pew Research Center Poll

Yet, despite the good election news, a Pew Research Center poll of 24 countries found that support for “representative democracy” is declining, with some 59% of respondents saying they are “dissatisfied with the functioning of their country’s democracy,” three-quarters of respondents feeling that “elected officials don’t care about what they think,” and support for alternative systems to democratic rule is growing. “In 13 countries, more than a quarter of people surveyed believe that a system in which strong leaders can make decisions without interference from parliaments or courts is a good form of government,” Pew noted.

As columnist Ishaan Tharoor (who, in the interest of full disclosure, is the writer’s son) wrote in The Washington Post earlier this year, “Illiberal values ​​and the politicians who espouse them are gaining strength across society, and many elected governments seem determined to undermine core principles of the democratic project, from a free press to the independence of institutions like the judiciary to the ability of the opposition to compete fairly with the ruling party.”

The future of democracy is by no means guaranteed.

Shashi Tharoor is a four-term Member of Parliament (Parliament) from Thiruvananthapuram, a former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and the author of 25 books, including the Sahitya Akademi award-winning Pax Indica: India and the world of the 21st Century.