What is the view of US democracy from abroad, and what can Americans learn from other nations with a history of political tumult?
During his first term Donald Trump tested democratic norms by undermining trust in fair elections, encouraging political violence and demonizing the media and public servants. He has promised to be a dictator “on day one” of his second term.
As Trump is inaugurated for a second time, we asked political correspondents at newspapers around the world – from Hungary to El Salvador – to share their view of what’s happening in America.
These are countries who have endured strongmen leaders and challenges to democracy. Do they see analogies with what is happening in the US today – and if so, what do they think the future holds for the world’s most powerful democracy?
András Pethő, Direkt36 (Hungary)
Americans should stop telling themselves “this can never happen here”. You have to brace yourself for the worst scenarios, because anything can happen.
In the first couple of years of the Orbán regime, when they proposed curbing the powers of the constitutional court and they appointed a member of Fidesz, Orbán’s party, to the state audit office, which is very important in controlling how spending public money is spent, I thought: “This would never happen in a democracy.” And then we learned that actually anything can happen, because if they have the power, they can and will [do] whatever they want.
All these institutions, whether we are talking about governments or agencies or the press, are very, very fragile. It’s very easy to dismantle them.
The American news media scene is still much more vibrant and robust than Hungary’s, so I think it would be harder for Trump or whoever, to take it over. In Hungary, a pro-government investor bought up all the local newspapers – there were only about 19 of them. That won’t happen in the US, but of course, a media crackdown or the spread of propaganda can happen in different ways. It might happen through X or through Facebook – that’s something that I’m paying attention to.
Glenda Gloria, Rappler (Philippines)
The campaign and outcome was very much like our 2022 presidential election. Leni Robredo and Kamala Harris decided late in the day to run, but when they did they galvanized a democratic base that we all thought had grown too cynical to be involved in any election.
But the narratives of [Bongbong] Marcos and Trump have had a head-start online, spreading so exponentially and viciously that no amount of groundwork could match them. Combine with a climate of fear and you can bend anything and anyone. We’ve seen that in the Duterte, years and we expect to see it – as we are beginning to – under Trump.
People who have a lot to lose and who once valued due process, freedom and accountability can easily do the bidding of authoritarian leaders. Institutions that once protected public interest can turn against it in an instant. America is in for a daily shock-to-the-system period. We know this from the Duterte years; the first two years were marked with disbelief – the daily attacks on media, the killings every night, the harassment of big business, the co-optation of the police and the military, the embrace of China despite intrusions into our territory. They seemed unreal.
Has our world gone mad? It has. We look at America now and joke: should we do workshops for our [journalism] colleagues? It’s utterly sad.
We’re paying close attention to how disinformation, and the networks that sustain it, will continue to prop up the Trump administration and Trumpism. That’s the belly of the beast. Because even the worst policies can be made right in a world of manufactured realities. How should US citizens counter or address that? We need to surface real-world experiences and initiatives that illustrate good citizenship. Islands of hope.
Carlos Dada, El Faro (El Salvador)
If you can draw any conclusions about Mr Trump from his first term, it is obvious that he has very little respect for institutions, and that his personality has an extraordinary weight over the exercise of the presidency. I don’t see anything that indicates his second term will be different.
In the case of El Salvador, Nayyib Bukele is exactly the kind of leader that Mr Trump loves. Trump embraces autocrats and derides democratic leaders, and Bukele is an autocrat. World leaders in the style of Mr Bukele – I’m talking about Orbán, Modi, Putin, of course — will just feel much more comfortable in their dismantling of democracy with Mr Trump and the presidency.
For Mr Trump, besides the personal affinities that he may have with Mr Bukele, his agenda for Central America is basically migration and security. That’s it. The traditional, post cold-war US agenda, which had a strong emphasis on democracy and human rights, is gone.
So I think as long as Mr Bukele is stopping migrants [from passing through El Salvador en route to the United States] and keeps the gangs effectively dismembered, then Washington won’t be an obstacle for Mr Bukele in his process of completely dismantling democracy and turning El Salvador into his own dictatorship.
Vinod K Jose, former editor of the Caravan and author of a forthcoming book on Indian democracy (India)
Trump’s strategy, like that of all strongmen autocrats, was to engage with voters at the level of emotion, not reason, and fiction, not facts. These are some rules in the playbook that autocratic leaders use all the time to get to power.
With Trump returning to White House, we are seeing a decisive moment in history. The third anti-democracy wave is here. The first two anti-democracy waves being the victory of Mussolini in the 1920s and Hitler coming to power in the 1930s culminating in the second world war, and the second anti-democracy wave in the 1960s with the rise of military juntas and the cold war bringing down elected governments. Now, with countries like India, Turkey and the Philippines already under anti-democracy forces, Trump’s victory empowers the hands of the autocrats world over.
Biden’s spell in office was the time given by the divine to systematically alter world history, [an opportunity] to look inward to see how Trumpism had so much support in 2016, [and to] fix the holes that drifted votes to Trump.
In that sense, the lost opportunity of the Biden years are comparable to the ten years that the Congress party had in India between the two spells of the Hindu right governments, Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s (1998 and 2004) and Narendra Modi, who came to power in 2014. The Congress party came to power in 2004 and did nothing to tackle the base of the right, or to win over the sympathetic fence-sitters, or to make cultural and social allies. The result? Modi, a leader who was even more radical than Vajpayee came to power, with more popular support. The 10 valuable years in history were lost.
I fear that 10, 20 years from now, people could turn back and say the Biden years did not achieve anything to stop Trump from returning.
Fernando Peinado, El Pais and author of Trumpistas: ¿Quién llevó a Trump al poder? (Spain)
A lot of coverage about the rise of Trump and the far-right elsewhere has focused on the economy, but I wonder if we are talking enough about a huge transformation that happened in the last decade – the earthquake within our media ecosystem.
In 2016, smartphones and social media played an outsized role as compared to previous elections. That accelerated everything. The news cycle turned into a news cyclone. That helped candidates who relied on viscerality.
Since that election we’ve seen wins by populists and far-right candidates elsewhere. In Spain, the far-right Vox emerged in 2018, having previously been very fringe. Something deep has changed and perhaps the US, and UK, with Brexit, were just two early examples of what was to come. The canaries in the coal mine.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of [Francisco] Franco’s death and the legacy of Franquismo is a very polarizing topic now. What’s new is how divisive the issue of Franco has become. For decades, there seemed to be a consensus that Francoism was a dark period for Spain. But now you have the [Conservative Partido Popular] unwilling to commemorate his death, and Vox is making an outspoken defense of his legacy.
Their statements in support of Franco haven’t damaged their approval rating, and that connects with all the weird things happening in the US – Trump doing unprecedented things that would have been taboo in a previous era.
Responses have been edited and condensed
Article by:Source – Danielle Renwick
