Essay | The election year 2024 is here – where are the examples of democracy?

Among other things The Economist has called 2024 “the biggest election year in history”. If June's EU elections are included, the national elections affect about half of the world's population. At least in India, Indonesia, the United States, Russia and Iran, we go to the urn. But do democracies have role models anymore?

Despite the election landslide, the year 2024 does not seem like a jubilee year for democracy. In both developing and established democracies, it is dominated by fear and uncertainty, preparation for an exhausting defensive battle. Anna Karenina according to: every democracy is unhappy in its own way.

in India Narendra Modi's the presidential term that started in 2014 has eroded the threefold division of power and made the position of the Muslim minority especially difficult. The spring elections will hardly bring much change to the situation. Religious dividing lines have also strengthened in Indonesia, which is preparing for February's elections, where the president Either Widodo the administration has pushed through questionable construction projects and strongly limited criticism of the government.

In June's EU elections, the increase in support is attributed to political groups that mainly aim to make the Union's decision-making more difficult. The collapse of the so-called top candidate procedure has been a blow to EU-level parliamentarism and has taken power in the direction of the member states.

Still the greatest expectations and fears are focused on the US presidential elections in November, which seem to repeat the 2020 elections down to the candidates. Internally, elections are not only about controlling the country's internal dividing lines, but more broadly about the ability of democratic institutions to defend themselves.

Although Donald Trump's the first season was not a disaster for Europe from the point of view of security policy, the stakes have increased with the war in Ukraine. According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Institute, almost half of Republicans see that supporting Ukraine has gone too far.

“

Every democracy is unhappy in its own way.

History shows that democracy can survive world wars, economic downturns and pandemics. It can also survive polarization, demographic challenges and swings in voter turnout. But can democracy survive without a future?

Thought exemplary has been a central part of the development of modern democracy. Even more than 200 years ago, democracy was mainly an idea of ​​the past, which was mostly associated with the small and self-sufficient city-states of antiquity. Developed the idea of ​​democratic general will in the 18th century Jean-Jacques Rousseau saw people's power as possible mainly in small states like Geneva.

The debate that followed the French Revolution significantly changed the temporal horizon of democracy: instead of an idea of ​​the past, democracy began to appear for the first time as a form of governance of the future. British parliamentarism had emphasized the importance of confrontations, but under the influence of German romanticism and French liberalism, the ideas of individuality and separateness gradually rose to the core of democracy. The demand for uniformity was replaced by pluralism.

It was in this tradition of thought that the role of the United States was extremely central. Modern democracy was not born as a strictly limited government system, but rather as a form of imitation that adheres to historical examples.

The first half of the 19th century gave rise to a fierce debate about where exactly that future was located. Some saw the future as belonging For Napoleon or Russia to Alexander I. However, since the 1840s by Alexis de Tocqueville with authors like When Europeans looked at the United States, they saw both democracy and the future.

Later history has shown that the United States' role as guardian of democracy has not lived up to all expectations. The World Police has repeatedly exceeded the limits of its authority, most recently in the war on terrorism. Despite this, the foreign policy orientation of the United States has been determined by a certain exemplary nature. That's how it was Woodrow Wilson in 1916, when the United States decided to enter World War I to keep the world “safe for democracy.” The same was true of Marshall aid and Harry S. Truman commitment to the reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War.

Donald Trump's political thinking is sometimes described as nostalgic, looking back. However, it should not be given Make America Great Again – to fool the slogan. Since the 1980s, Trump's political thinking has been built on the criticism of exemplaryity – the view that the United States should not act as the moral authority of the global system. Trump's world is a world of competition, where the United States is seen as suffering from too much adherence to rules or adherence to lofty principles. This is especially the case with China. The price of being a moral role model is too high.

This has led to a special situation in world politics. Authoritarian states like Russia imitate democratic practices: they organize elections or have the president answer citizens' questions on television. At the same time, democracies are more critical of their own role models than before: democracies are also now required to put the national interest first, regardless of marginal conditions.

No it is no exaggeration to say that the future is one of the most important democratic ideas. Not because the future is a source of hope – or because it provides food for building utopias. The idea of ​​future openness is important, because it enables one of the most important skills of democracy, the ability to make compromises.

A political reality in which a significant proportion of people feel that they are on the verge of an existential struggle – in which every election is potentially the last and decisive – will inevitably gradually degenerate into a culture of one truth.

The author is an academic researcher at the University of Helsinki