First, eliminate your opponents physically. Or, if you shy away from such murderous acts, at least arrest them. Or exile them. Or make it exceedingly difficult for them to campaign against you. Whatever you do, dear leader, prevent meaningful competition.
Increasingly, across the developing world, these methods seem common, pernicious, and dangerous; remaining democratic in name only becomes the norm. Even in these United States, states like Georgia are trying to tighten rules on who votes, who votes when, and who votes where. The right to vote freely should be sacrosanct. And so should the right to ask for support openly and without hindrance be fundamental to the pursuit of freedom. Instead, electoral autocracy and supreme strictures on free and fair balloting more and more prevail.
Some nation-states can even falsify the results of an election after the fact. That is what Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro has done in claiming an implausible victory and, post-election, arresting citizens throughout the country who claim that Edmundo Gonzalez, now safely in Spain, overwhelmingly won many more votes. (See 283 - "How to Steal and Election: The Big Lie, Aug. 1.) Justifiably fearing imprisonment or physical harm, Gonzalez fled this week into the Spanish embassy in Caracas and then was transported by the Spanish air force to Madrid. Our own Trump tried to foreshadow Maduro on Jan. 6, 2021; ever since, even in Tuesday's debate, he persists in denying such a significant loss.
Many other elections around the world have been stolen, notably in Zimbabwe on five occasions, in the Democratic Republic of Congo at least once, in Kenya once or twice, in Gabon one two or three occasions, often in Paraguay, twice in Bolivia, and years ago in Argentina.
Nicaragua is the poster child for repressing democratic freedoms, by far. Yesterday, its parliament (controlled by dictatorial President Daniel Ortega) legalized the imprisonment of citizens who cause alarm or spread fear on social media. Critics of Ortega will be punished by five years’ jail. Already hordes of opponents have been sentenced to long terms in prison. And just this week Ortega’s government revoked the citizenship and seized the property of 135 dissidents. Earlier more than 300 Nicaraguans had suffered the same fate for speaking out against Ortega. His regime has also shuttered 5,500 NGOs.
Tanzania and Tunisia, both theoretically democracies, have joined the ranks of those wannabe autocracies that really prefer to control balloting outcomes, especially when it involves parties and strong persons presuming to challenge those nominally in charge.
Last week armed men invaded a public transport bus in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's commercial capital, and handcuffed and abducted a leading member of Chadema, the country's recently reinstated main opposition party. A day later his body was found; an autopsy revealed that he had been beaten badly, and acid poured over his face. "He was absolutely destroyed," said Chadema's former presidential candidate. "It was a horrible death."
Tanzania will hold national elections next year. When President Samia Suluhu Hassan came to power after the sudden death of erratically despotic President John Magufuli in 2021 she promised to ease repression, reversing Magufuli's policies. She allowed political rallies, let newspapers resume publishing, and invited foreign investment.
But then she stalled, reneging on promises to write a new, liberal, national constitution, upgrade the electoral law, and really permit free expression. A Chadema leader says that "Magufuli did it [repression] with a snarl...Samia does [the same thing] with a smile."
The brutal killing of the Chadema figure followed a few weeks after 500 of his fellow party members had been arrested. Tanzania's government, ahead of elections, was removing vocal opponents from campaigning, just as it did before the 2020 elections. The recent abduction and death also followed a range of other abductions of vocal critics of the Samia administration. Some were tortured and deposited at police stations. Others are still missing.
Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) -- Party of the Revolution -- has dominated Tanzania since 1959, first under popular and gentle President Julius Nyerere, later under number of autocrats and finally under Magufuli. Now, even Samia and her government seem notably implicated in a determined attempt to reduce Chadema and its impact on popular opinion.
Tunisia, under President Kais Saied has not as yet ordered the police to mutilate and kill his main opponents. But he has had them arrested and removed from contention; their campaigns have been ruled illegal and they themselves have been banned from standing against him.
Saied came to office through the ballot box, promising a professorial strengthening of Tunisia's post-Arab Spring North African democratic credentials. Instead, he took advantage in 2021 (Chancellor Hitler style) of massive public protests against Covid-19 restrictions and economic hardships and dismissed the elected prime minister, suspended parliament and took away the legal immunity of legislators (threatening to prosecute them), and in effect peremptorily suspended the 2014 national constitution. He said that he would rule alone, by decree. (Trump wants to do the same if he should be elected in November.)
Tunisia holds a presidential election on Oct. 6. In April and July, Saied's national guard detained the key leaders of the one-time ruling and mildly Islamist political party -- Ennahdha. They have been denied access to lawyers. The judicial system, anyway, is controlled by Saied.
The intended result is, Soviet style, that Saied should run next month opposed only by "hand-picked" friendly contenders.
As the regional director of Amnesty International commented: “The Tunisian authorities’ disrespect for human rights and their crackdown against opponents must stop. From arbitrary arrests of critical journalists, lawyers, activists and politicians to the systematic undermining of judicial independence, authorities must reverse this repressive path to put human rights front and center of government.”
In neither the Tanzanian nor the Tunisian cases are free and fair elections possible. Conceivably, Tanzania could release Chadema detainees and open up the kind of free public discourse over which Nyerere presided in the 1960s before Tanzania became a one-party state. But it may well be too late and too threatening for Samia to free the Tanzanian public space for meaningful competitive deliberations and disputations.
Saied has negated the meaning of the Arab Spring revolt, which began in his country. Samia fears losing power. But both refusals to play fair do more than turn democratic superstructures to dust. They sanction models that will likely proliferate across the developing world.
Already, the rest of North Africa and much of sub-Saharan Africa is run by despots like President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi in Egypt, newly elected President Abdelmadjid Tebboune (with 95 percent of the vote) in Algeria, and a warlord in eastern Libya who battles for primacy against UN backed authorities in western Libya. Angola, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Gabon, Guinea, Mali, Morocco, Niger, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe all have electoral autocrats, military coup leaders, or monarchs in charge. Like Saied, they deny the free exchange of ideas and open competition. Illiberal democracy, to paraphrase Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, and Trump, his admirer, denies citizens their rights of choice. Democrats must fight back, and Washington and Ottawa must consistently decry such despoilers.
I cannot tell you or overstate how VALUABLE this work is chronicling the kinds of endemic polity corruption you so deftly & professionally chronicle, professor! What would the world do without you !!!
I cannot tell you or overstate how VALUABLE this work is chronicling the kinds of endemic polity corruption you so deftly & professionally chronicle, professor! What would the world do without you !!!
Kind praise indeed. Thank you!