Consider This from NPR - It's the biggest election year in modern history. Will democracy prevail?

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

This year, more than half the world's population lives in countries that are choosing leaders. And those choices will tell us a lot about the state of democracy around the world.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

2024 is the year of elections. Team Taiwan! Taiwan, India, and El Salvador are among more than 60 national governments conducting elections this year. It's now halftime in the calendar year, and we have already seen some dramatic changes. Just this week, the far right in France we have already seen some dramatic changes. Just this week, the far right in France won the first round of snap elections. Here's current French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal. He says, never in our democracy has our parliament risked being dominated by the far right. And in the UK, polls show that voters are tired of the conservatives who have held power for 14 years. Brits seem ready to elect a liberal prime minister this week.

When we step back and look at the last six months of elections, there are some clear trends. Although democracy around the world has been declining for well over a decade, it has done surprisingly well in many elections this year, such as Senegal. That's 44-year-old President Bassirou Diomai Faye. In April, he became Africa's youngest elected head of state. Another trend? In many countries, incumbents are struggling, often because voters are dissatisfied with the economy. That happened in South Africa, where people like 49-year-old Nkosinati Ntiani voted against the party of Nelson Mandela. I'm here to vote for a change for my life and for the country. By and large, people are unhappy with their governments, much more unhappy with their

governments than they were 10, 30, 40 years ago. So with some exceptions, being incumbent is increasingly a disadvantage. That's Steve Levitsky. He's a professor of government at Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die. Consider this. More than half the world's population lives in countries that are choosing leaders this year. And the choices they make will tell us a lot about the state of democracy around the world. Coming up, we hear from election watchers

about what's at stake in three countries that have yet to vote, Venezuela, Georgia, and Ghana. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Consider This from NPR. To recap some election trends this year, democracy has been surprisingly resilient. Incumbents are not doing great,

and economic factors tend to be what's motivating voters. Let's look now at three countries with important elections coming up in the second half of the year, Venezuela, Georgia, and Ghana. My guests are Tamara Teresuk-Brauner. She's a human rights and legal expert in Latin America, where Venezuela is about to vote. Hi, Tamara. Hi, Ari. Very nice to be here with you. Tamara Sartagna is watching elections in Georgia's capital city, Tbilisi, Georgia. It's good to have you here, Tamara, number two. Thank you. I'm very honored to speak today.

And Marie-Noelle Nwokolo is an international development researcher born and raised in Ghana. Good to have you with us. Thank you, Ari. It's good to be here with you all. So three countries, three continents, Venezuela, Georgia, and Ghana. Since Venezuela votes first, let's begin there. I'd like to play you a clip of tape from a voter who, like millions of Venezuelans, fled the country as the economy was imploding. And when NPR asked whether he plans to vote, Jose Suarez replied, I can't. I can't because the government, I think, has many obstacles. Yeah, because I don't have the passport.

I don't have any document to make my vote. Of course, Nicolas Maduro is the autocratic leader who has overseen this collapse of Venezuela. Tamara Tarasyuk-Brawner, is Venezuela's election in late July shaping up to be free and fair, especially when millions of Venezuelans, yourself included, as I understand, have left and may struggle to cast absentee votes? It's impossible to see Venezuelan elections as free and fair today. You have a context in which millions of people have been forced to flee. Many of us abroad were not able to register because we were asked for absurd requirements. I live in Uruguay, for example, and they asked me for an ID that was valid for four years,

when in Uruguay, they were issued for three. There continues to be repression against political opposition, against critics more broadly. However, this is a very important moment for Venezuela because despite an ongoing humanitarian emergency and continued targeted repression, people want to vote. So this makes this election critical, even if the conditions are very far from free and fair. Let's turn to Georgia, which shares a border with Russia. Tens of thousands of people there have been protesting a new law that Parliament passed over the president's veto. And I saw a photograph of one protester who was holding a sign that said, Russian law is not the will of Georgia. So Tamara Sartanya, how do Georgia's parliamentary elections in October reflect this global tension between democracy and autocracy? Yes, you're right. The ruling party just passed a law that

they call the Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence, but it is colloquially dubbed as a Russian law, because it's in spirit, mimics the same laws that Russia passed in 2012. And basically, after the passage of that law, any independent media, any independent civil society organization basically disappeared from Russia. And just to give you a bigger picture of what is at stake is that currently the incumbent government has been in power for 12 years, since 2012. They are eyeing their fourth term. And throughout these years, they have managed to consolidate power at almost every single level of governance. And the only sort of pockets of independent organizations are civil society and media.

So if the government gets rid of those, there is nothing left of democracy, so to say. That's why these elections are very crucial because basically it's a referendum between will Georgia continue to develop as a democratic country or will we slide back to a Soviet-style dictatorship, so to say? So incredibly high stakes in Georgia. Indeed.

And then in Ghana, Marie-Noelle Nwokolo, you wrote a paper arguing that Ghana's election in December needs to show, as you put it, that democracy is the way to go for the region and the continent. And so what are the stakes for West Africa and for Ghana in your country's elections? The upcoming elections in Ghana is a really highly anticipated event set for December 7th. And it will be a significant contest between the incumbent party, the New Patriotic Party, and the main opposition, the National Democratic Congress. I think this election is crucial because it would set the direction for Ghana's political and economic future, including resuscitating an economy which has experienced one of the worst economic crises since the 1980s. This is particularly important given the context of West Africa and the recent spate of coups

that we've seen across the region. Ghana has also been that one country with a stable democracy that people have looked up to on the continent and in the region especially. In the first six months of the year, as we've heard, there have been a few trends in global elections. Democracy has done better than expected. Incumbents seem to be doing badly. And voters mostly seem motivated by economic concerns. Does that ring true to the three of you with the trend lines that you are seeing in your countries? This is Tamara. And I find your question extremely interesting when you

put Venezuela's election in context in Latin America. In the region, there has been a tendency over the past few years of voting against the incumbent, actually, because what we see is people wanting to find responses by the governments to their basic needs. And they don't care who provides those responses as long as governments deliver. In Venezuela, however, what I am seeing is actually that the situation is so bad that the government is even losing the basis that it's always had in elections. And there is a big opportunity for democracy to win. I was listening to the other Tamara and to Marie Noel, and Venezuela is already a dictatorship. And the question now is, will this election provide an opportunity to bring the country back to the path to a transition to democracy? And in Georgia?

Marie, you're completely right that bread and butter issues is what's on the mind of the people. And you're also right that there is a sort of frustration with the incumbent, especially in case of Georgia, where the incumbent Georgian ruling party has been in power for 12 years. However, the problem is that the support for opposition is not high either. So basically

what you have, you have people who are frustrated with the current government, but you don't have a viable opposition that they're willing to vote for. So many parallels across very different parts of the world. I'm curious what this looks like from Ghana. Yes, Ari. And I think we all very well could be reading from the same script because here in Ghana as well, it really is the economic situation and parties are actually increasingly reflecting that in their campaigns, which is a variation from what we've done in the past. But I think the challenge really is a lot of people have heard these things over and over again. And if you consider the fact that a majority of people

really are under 35 years old. So these are people that, if I can put it, have been, to use a more Gen Z term, gaslit for most of their lives. I think the challenge in this election for a lot of people is really the economic basics and whether any of these two parties who have been tried before will actually live up to what they say they will do. We've been talking with three election experts in different parts of the world. Marie-Noelle Nwokolo in Ghana is a senior researcher and policy advisor at the Brenthurst Foundation. Tamara Sartagna is an independent election watcher in Tbilisi, Georgia. And Tamara Tarasuk-Brauner is director of the Peter D. Bell Rule of Law Program at the Inter-American Dialogue. She's watching Venezuela.

Thank you to all three of you for your insights. Thank you. And good luck to Venezuela. Thank you, Ari. And thank you, everyone else. This episode was produced by Karen Zamora and Jordan Marie Smith, with reporting by NPR's global democracy correspondent Frank Langfitt. It was edited by Jeanette Woods and Patrick Jaron-Watanana.

And one more thing before we go. You can now enjoy the Consider This newsletter. We still help you break down a major story of the day, but you'll also get to know our producers and hosts and some moments of joy from the All Things Considered team. You can sign up at npr.org slash consider this newsletter. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.