SANTIAGO/NEW YORK – When global leaders gather virtually on December 9-10 for US President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy, they ought to be asking themselves a simple question: What can we do to help democracy’s bravest advocates, like the protesters who are risking their lives in Sudan?

For months, hundreds of thousands of people have flooded Sudan’s streets, demanding an accountable government and the end of military rule, even though Sudanese security forces have met them with bullets. Dozens of protesters have died.

Their courage is not unique. From Belarus to Bolivia, and even in the United Kingdom and the United States, civil-society leaders and organizations are heading bold movements to resist structural oppression, authoritarianism, and injustice.

Sadly, their work could not be more urgent. Threats to civil-society leaders and democratic institutions are increasing around the world. Nationalism, inequality, and political polarization are on the rise worldwide, and pandemic-related restrictions on public gatherings and increasingly advanced surveillance technology have empowered authoritarian regimes.

In Colombia, 65 environmental activists were killed in 2020. The Nigerian government’s ban on domestic use of Twitter, imposed in June this year, remains in force. And in August, the Ugandan government suspended the operations of 54 human-rights organizations.

These crackdowns, in democracies and authoritarian states alike, have lasting consequences. By restricting civil liberties – including freedom of the press, assembly, and expression – and attacking the organizations that defend them, states are leaving our rights and institutions defenseless against future attacks.

This is why our civil-society grantees and partners are sounding the alarm bells. Organizations across causes and countries are being targeted by similar strategies, including accusations of “foreign interference” whenever they work with established international organizations and philanthropic institutions like the ones we lead.

These attacks must not continue. They threaten not only the lives and livelihoods of thousands of civil-society organizers and activists around the world, but also democracy itself. As authoritarian regimes go about disempowering these essential groups and disrupting their vital work, their cynical representatives call democracy “idealistic” and “naive.”

We fundamentally reject this view. We embrace the power of democracy precisely because it requires constant maintenance, protection, and participation. The peace and stability it fosters are won by an inclusive social contract, not an iron fist.

In that spirit, Biden’s Summit for Democracy aims to support democratic renewal, civic participation, and multilateral collaboration. The gathering presents an important opportunity for leaders to recommit to the fundamental rights of assembly, association, expression, and information at home, and to promote these rights abroad through strategic diplomacy.

But verbal commitments alone go only so far. As states engage in virtual conversation this week, they must be prepared to move beyond rhetoric and affirm the importance of these rights by matching words with deeds in the fight for civic space.

In the human-rights domain, this means advancing international and national protections for free speech and free assembly, thereby ensuring every individual’s right to voice dissent in the face of authoritarianism. In many states, ensuring freedom of expression will require repealing sedition laws and adopting moratoriums on internet shutdowns. Furthermore, governments should block the export and transfer of surveillance equipment to repressive regimes.

Most urgently, global leaders must substantially increase investments in the civil-society organizations that provide a critical check on state power. And they must commit tangible resources to human-rights defenders, local journalists, social services, and community centers.

This requires not only supporting these organizations in times of crisis, when they are already scrambling to serve their communities, but also investing in their long-term growth – which is an investment in sustaining an active citizenry prepared to confront future emergencies. For example, democratic leaders should scale up wraparound protection mechanisms that provide at-risk activists with legal, medical, psychosocial, digital-security, and relocation support services – particularly those schemes operating near where regional and national attacks on civil society are taking place. This is one of the surest ways states can support those risking their lives to defend democracy.

Lastly, leaders must unite around the common democratic cause and collaborate closely in multisector, multilateral partnerships. Across government, the philanthropic sector, the private sector, and civil society, we have an opportunity to build on the dialogue at the summit and use our unique strengths to expand civic space. After all, the best protector of civic space is more civic space – populated by engaged, connected citizens who have the resources, protections, and power to advocate for their own rights and livelihoods.

Engaged citizenship can be transformative. In Moldova and Malaysia, for example, civil-society organizations helped to overturn repressive “state of emergency” laws this year, preventing the dangerous erosion of democratic institutions. And millions of people marched in Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, forming probably the largest mass movement in US history.

Regardless of the origin of the struggle or the distance it travels, when people come together peacefully to defend their fundamental human rights, they make tremendous progress toward dignity, equity, and justice for all. From Khartoum to Kuala Lumpur, let us protect and advance that progress in word and deed, and ensure that it holds strong for the next generation.

ROME – This week, US President Joe Biden will hold a virtual Summit for Democracy, to be followed in roughly a year’s time by a second in-person gathering of leaders from around the world. More than 100 governments have been invited to attend.

Granted, not all invitees are democratic stalwarts. In fact, the democratic credentials of many are questionable, to say the least. Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Kenya, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Serbia made the cut, despite their authoritarian leanings, and geopolitical considerations also led the White House to include Brazil, India, the Philippines, and Poland, notwithstanding those countries’ democratic backsliding in recent years.

In any case, the more interesting question concerns those countries whose democratic credentials are not in doubt. Do they have common characteristics beyond the fact that they hold free and fair elections, maintain the rule of law, and ensure freedom of expression and other individual rights?

One thing is certain: The cohort of true democracies is smaller than it was ten years ago. Although far-right movements have recently lost some traction in Western Europe, and though populist autocrats have become less popular in Brazil, Hungary, Turkey, and even Russia, there has been a well-documented global trend toward comparatively more authoritarian political systems over the past decade. Among the 146 countries with more than two million residents, Freedom House considered only 39 to be “fully free” in 2020, down from 43 in 2010.

But a less noticed feature of today’s true democracies is that they tend to have aging populations. Of those 146 larger countries, almost none has both a convincing democracy score (above 85 on Freedom House’s 100-point index) and a relatively young population. The only exceptions are tiny Costa Rica and Uruguay, which have strong democratic institutions and median ages in the mid-30s.

As the chart below shows, no sizable country is both young and free. The democracies are clustered in the top right corner, representing the world’s strongest civil and political rights as well as its oldest populations. This development has been accelerating over the past decade and will become only more entrenched in the future, given demographic trends. This is not to suggest that political freedom causes populations to age, or that older societies are more conducive to democracy. The only causal link one can assert is that the well-being furnished by open societies tends to lengthen life spans and allow for better family planning. 

But in an age of rapid global change and multiplying crises, these demographic trends raise urgent questions. Does a growing share of older voters affect how a country will adapt and respond to international shocks, financial crises, inflationary or deflationary threats, disruptive technologies, migration waves, and all the issues associated with climate change?

This was a central question in Germany’s recent federal election (though it lingered beneath the surface of the usual party rivalries). Germany, followed closely by Italy, has the highest median age in Europe. More than half of each country’s electorate is older than 50. The number of eligible German voters fell by 1.3 million in the last general election, owing to demographic decline. In West Germany’s 1987 national election, 23% of voters were under the age of 30, and 26% were over 60. In 2021, 14.4% were under 30 and 38.2% were over 60. A similar or even sharper trend can be seen in Italy, Japan, and South Korea.

Age, of course, bears heavily on psychological traits and political preferences. Older individuals tend to be a little wiser; but they are also more cautious and slower to understand new developments. They are generally less able or willing to adapt to the twists and turns of history. Younger people, by contrast, tend to be flexible, less risk-averse, and more resilient to shocks.

To be sure, these characteristics of individuals are not always reflected at the level of countries. The first mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 came from graying Germany. The oldest society in the world, Japan, is also a world leader in robotics, precisely because it needs to ensure care for the elderly and maintain productivity with fewer and older workers. Clearly, countries with relatively fewer young people are still able to innovate.

In other respects, however, these countries’ demographically driven conservatism (or at least complacency) and lack of a bold long-term vision is undeniable. Consider Europe’s panicked reactions every time there is even a minor wave of migration, or the relative tolerance for deflationary trends in Europe and Japan, where millions of retirees are living off rents. Moreover, democratic countries’ increasing reluctance to take risks in geopolitical crises played no small part in the West’s humiliations in Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan.

The absence of boldness, openness to novelty, and long-term vision in today’s democracies is not reassuring. Worse, there is no obvious antidote, other than to try to give young people a greater voice. In Germany, where the new coalition government includes the two parties most favored by younger voters, the Greens and the Free Democrats, a reduction of the voting age to 16 has now made an official appearance on the government’s to-do list.

That may be a prudent reform for other democracies to discuss at this year’s Summit for Democracy.

MADRID – All over the world, democracy is in retreat. In 2020, the Democracy Index, published by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) since 2006, fell to its lowest-ever global level. This development cannot be attributed exclusively to restrictions imposed due to the pandemic, because the ratings have been in free fall since 2015. So it is not surprising that in his first foreign policy speech as US president, Joe Biden focused on the need to safeguard democratic values around the world.

Biden reaffirmed his intent, which he announced during his campaign, to organize a Summit for Democracy early in his presidency. In Biden’s own words, this summit “will bring together the world’s democracies to strengthen our democratic institutions, honestly confront countries that are backsliding, and forge a common agenda.” The United Kingdom has embraced the idea by proposing the establishment of a D10, to be formed with the members of the G7 along with Australia, India, and South Korea.

The outline and complementarity of these proposals have not yet been determined, but their essence is far from new. When John McCain ran for president against Barack Obama in 2008, he advocated the creation of a League of Democracies that would encompass more than a hundred states. In fact, when McCain floated the idea, a similar (but more modest) coalition had already existed since 2000, when the United States and Poland spearheaded the foundation of the Community of Democracies (CoD). That initiative still operates, but it is almost completely forgotten, demonstrating the difficulty of sustaining such efforts.

From its beginning, the CoD was hampered by incongruities and tactical dissention, as well as by doubts about its purpose. Unfortunately, the countries that joined the project were not successfully encouraged to perfect their respective democratic systems. One revealing fact is that the organization’s seat is in Poland, currently at number 50 in the EIU rankings, after marked democratic deterioration in recent years.

Before getting underway, Biden’s Summit for Democracy will face the very questions that caused similar projects to run aground: who, how, and why. When considering these questions frankly, one can identify a series of obstacles and drawbacks, which lately have become even more difficult to circumvent.

The first uncomfortable reality that the US must negotiate is that, even though it maintains much of its gravitational pull in the international arena, its reputation as a standard-bearer for democracy has suffered some significant blows. Clearly, the country is passing through a serious institutional and social crisis, owing largely to the transgressions of the Trump administration, with the connivance of the Republican Party. Biden’s arrival – with his promise of unity and eagerness to mend fences – has been a great relief, but his conciliatory approach will not bear fruit overnight.

Beyond these domestic considerations in the US, which other countries would be invited to the summit? Inviting too many would make reaching consensus more difficult, while including too few would lead to unproductive overlaps with existing forums such as the G7. Moreover, inviting some governments with dubious democratic credentials could contribute to whitewashing their practices, but excluding them could lead to diplomatic crises and be counterproductive from a strategic point of view.

It remains to be seen whether Biden contemplates merely a single summit or a more permanent coalition – perhaps even taking an institutionalized form. The first option would be purely symbolic and hardly worth the effort. The second would run up against the imperatives of a multipolar order in which economic ties and vicinity play an essential role.

Sharing the same political system does not imply sharing the same interests and priorities, so providing a coalition of democracies with a concrete, substantial, and lasting objective is practically impossible. When realpolitik enters the scene (for example, in trade matters), the coalition could be discredited.

Lastly, although a Summit for Democracy could be packaged positively, not punitively, it would surely be interpreted as an effort to draw a sharp dividing line between democracies and autocracies. To situate this dividing line at the center of international relations is to risk precipitating what we can still avoid: another cold war, this time between the US and China. In the face of the tremendous global threats looming over us, from pandemics to climate change, a dynamic of confrontation between rival blocs would impede – if not prevent – the multilateral cooperation that we sorely need.

But recognizing the drawbacks of Biden’s proposal does not mean that we should resign ourselves to the global decline of democracy. Although it is advisable to opt for the G20 or for even more representative and ambitious formats to manage the shared challenges of the twenty-first century, democratic countries can use other, already existing, frameworks for more fruitful dialogue. Likewise, democracies can reinforce their moral leadership by distancing themselves from the abuses of autocratic regimes, as Biden has just done by withdrawing US support for Saudi Arabia’s offensive in Yemen.

If anything has become clear of late, it is that democracy is not usually lost in the blink of an eye. It is often eroded little by little, almost unnoticed day to day. In order to rebuild it, a piecemeal approach – instead of grand global gestures – may prove most effective. By working patiently from the bottom up, and from the local to the international, we can still help democracy regain its luster.

Jan-Werner Mueller: Right-wing authoritarian populists in power can copy pages from one another’s repression playbooks; that is one reason why their governance styles often have distinct similarities. But that does not mean that their initial success is driven by the same factors. At the risk of sounding very pedantic, I will point out that national contexts matter a great deal on this front, as different countries obviously have their historical legacies and “political opportunity structures” (in the language of the social sciences). The AfD has rooted itself firmly in a number of regions. But, nationally, it is still far weaker than Austria’s Freedom Party or Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France.

There are, however, potential lessons in terms of strategy. The Rassemblement National has tried to distance itself from the legacy of fascism. But what Le Pen calls “de-diabolization” carries political risks, as Éric Zemmour’s recent rise as a potential rival to Le Pen shows. But the AfD’s trajectory highlights the potential advantages of Le Pen’s approach. While AfD’s increasingly pronounced racism and historical revisionism appeal to some, they severely limit the voting pool. Those who merely want to cast a protest vote may well want to avoid anything resembling neo-fascism.

JWM: Trump has transformed the Republican Party into a kind of personality cult. A real political party would allow internal debate and dissent. And yet, it has become impossible to remain in good standing within the Republican Party while criticizing Trump. When there is no real program, there can be no critical loyalty justified with regard to political principles; there are no principles, only one person. This goes to show that, as old-fashioned or idealistic as it might sound, internal party democracy matters. Moreover, parties that are internally autocratic are likely to exhibit autocratic tendencies when they are in government.

To prevent another Trumpian victory, Trump’s political opponents must do everything possible to push back against the state-level Republican efforts to advance voter suppression and enable election subversion. As for journalists, they should resist the temptation to keep Trump in the national spotlight simply because he attracts clicks or views. They must also avoid “false balance” or “both sideism”: treating two opposing perspectives as if they were equally credible, even when the evidence says otherwise, or when one side is actually undermining democracy. At the same time, however, they must not succumb to the temptation of presenting themselves as the resistance – an approach that would play into the hands of Trump and his cronies, who have long sought to discredit professional reporting as partisan.

JWM: Changes to party (and media) systems could be a first step. When such systems are open to change, it becomes harder to claim that there is a homogeneous elite controlling the state. You might not like Podemos or Syriza’s programs, but the way they transformed Spanish and Greek politics, respectively, offers hope that democracies can adapt to social and economic developments. There is also a lot of room for improvement in campaign finance.

These suggestions might sound a bit old-fashioned, so I should add that I also favor bolder experiments, such as empowering assemblies of randomly chosen citizens. I think that this approach could be best suited for dealing with matters on which we can hardly expect parties to make unselfish decisions, such as campaign finance or the size of parliaments. It is less plausible for day-to-day policymaking, where traditional parties still serve us well.

BY THE WAY . . .

JWM: Let me clarify that, unlike liberty and equality, uncertainty is not a foundational value. It is not necessarily desirable – the pandemic has made that much painfully clear. But some uncertainty is crucial in real democracies: while political procedures should be certain, results should never be entirely predictable. In authoritarian systems, by contrast, the outcome is always clear, but the rules are subject to sudden changes, aimed at ensuring the regime’s power. So, democracies must retain their open and dynamic character. That might sometimes require re-imagining rules and procedures, but never in the self-serving ways aspiring autocrats do.

JWM: My argument, for better or for worse, has been that populists are those who claim that they, and only they, represent the “the real people” – a group that excludes not only “corrupt” elites, but also many citizens. In fact, the crucial – and most dangerous – feature of populism is not anti-elitism, but anti-pluralism: the tendency to exclude the “other,” rather obviously at the level of party politics (where rival candidates are depicted as corrupt) and, less obviously, at the level of the citizenry (with already-vulnerable minorities often being targeted).

Unfortunately, the label is still being applied indiscriminately. It has become a cliché that we live in the “age of populism,” so a wide variety of phenomena – from racism to economic protectionism – are simply being placed under the umbrella of “populism.” This lack of precision impairs our political judgment.

JWM: The EU has adopted a typically technocratic discourse: it is always crafting new “tools” or “mechanisms” to deal with rogue regimes. But the issue was never a lack of tools; it was a lack of political will – specifically, the de facto protection Europe’s center-right and Christian Democratic parties have given to Orbán. Today, however, the EU might finally be willing to cut funds to Hungary, not least because it finally seems to have recognized that it has been effectively subsidizing Orbán’s crony system – and thus its own enemies.

I don’t want to speculate about the elections. But, like many other observers, I would note that Orbán is putting allies in key positions, from which they are hard to remove even with clear majorities. If his Fidesz party loses at the polls, these allies would retain significant amounts of power.

JWM: After the Cold War ended, democracies succumbed to an illusion: not that the world had reached the much-discussed “end of history,” but rather that only they were able to learn. The assumption was that democracies make mistakes all the time, but are capable of self-correcting; authoritarian regimes, by contrast, lack that capacity, and thus will always end up like the Soviet Union.

That has turned out to be very wrong. In fact, authoritarians can learn, too. That hardly makes authoritarian regimes invincible. But I do fear that we still tend to underestimate them.

WASHINGTON, DC – Czech voters delivered an upset in their country’s parliamentary election in October, choosing a coalition of mainly center-right opposition parties over the movement led by the populist former prime minister, Andrej Babiš. With the new coalition naming Petr Fiala as the new prime minister, the outcome adds to a growing playbook of strategies for competing against illiberal populists in Central Europe and Turkey.

During Babiš’s tenure as prime minister, he presided over a decline in democracy in the Czech Republic and was embroiled in several corruption scandals. Though Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have fueled more significant democratic declines in their respective countries, Babiš relied on some of their methods, including efforts to take over the state administration and undermine the independence of news media.

Anti-democratic leaders learn from one another to refine their approach to dismantling democracy. To defeat them, democratic opposition parties should draw five lessons from recent elections in the Czech Republic and elsewhere.

First, unity is crucial. In the Czech election, the opposition parties that comprise the new government formed two ideologically broad electoral blocs. Hungary, where a fragmented opposition has failed to mount an effective challenge to Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party since 2010, has long offered a cautionary counterpoint. But six opposition parties have joined forces in their bid to oust Fidesz in next year’s parliamentary election, and recently nominated provincial mayor Péter Márki-Zay as their candidate to challenge Orbán.

A second priority is to address local issues. For example, some analysts attribute Hillary Clinton’s 2016 US presidential election defeat by Donald Trump in part to the Democratic Party’s failure to nurture grassroots support in key states such as Wisconsin.

Contrast that with Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski’s unexpectedly strong showing in Poland’s 2020 presidential election. Although Trzaskowski narrowly lost to the incumbent Andrzej Duda of the illiberal ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, he showed how a supposed “urban elite” politician can connect with rural voters. Trzaskowski campaigned across Poland, including in the PiS’s village and rural strongholds, often with a well-tailored local message. In Skierniewice, a small city in central Poland that had recently been struck by drought, Trzaskowski focused on local water issues, which he linked to his broader climate agenda.

Trzaskowski acknowledged in a 2019 interview that PiS had a stronger ground game in previous elections, and that its “Poland in ruins” message resonated with voters outside major cities who felt that former Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s 2007-14 Civic Platform (PO) government had not listened to their concerns. In an attempt to win back their support, Trzaskowski distanced himself from some of the PO’s previous unpopular measures and strove to show small-town and rural voters that he was not selling a return to the previous status quo. Although Trzaskowski’s campaign fell narrowly short of victory, it made progress rallying a beleaguered opposition and winning a broader base of voters.

Third, anti-populists should provide an affirmative vision, as opposition candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu did in defeating the candidate of Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the 2019 Istanbul mayoral election. İmamoğlu’s positive and upbeat campaign – with its clarion call of “radical love,” a direct response to the AKP’s divide-and-rule strategy – was essential to his success.

Another affirmative opposition tactic is to “own” issues. The Greens, for example, used this strategy in the 2019 European Parliament elections to secure a record number of seats. They largely owned environmental, social-justice, and rule-of-law issues, and advanced a policy agenda that reflected a positive vision of Green leadership in Europe.

Fourth, opposition candidates should avoid culture warfare. Populist attitudes are activated by political context: linking identity and partisanship can make cultural issues more salient and create fertile conditions for populist views to flourish. Throughout his 2020 campaign, for example, Duda sought to roll back LGBTQ rights, touted anti-Semitic views, and fueled anti-German sentiment in an attempt to stoke populist sentiment.

Importantly, Trzaskowski did not adopt the language of the right. Research shows that when liberal candidates use their populist opponents’ framing, they allow the populist to shape, and likely win, the debate. Likewise, mainstream candidates who mimic populist rhetoric are more likely to lose.

Instead of taking Duda’s bait, Trzaskowski stayed on message with a vision for Poland that could appeal to a wide spectrum of voters. His response even led Duda to modify his nativist agenda in order to court moderate voters. Particularly in rural areas, where Duda had expected cultural issues to be most potent, Trzaskowski’s focus on local concerns helped him avoid divisive culture clashes.

Lastly, democratic opponents of illiberalism need to appeal to fundamental values in order to build public understanding and support. In the recent Czech election, the opposition coalitions referred to themselves primarily as “democratic,” reflecting many voters’ concerns that the Babiš government had moved the country in a decidedly undemocratic direction.

Similarly, in the 2019 Slovak presidential election, Zuzana Čaputová defeated her populist opponents by emphasizing inclusivity. When the far-right candidate Marian Kotleba claimed that homosexuality threatened Christian values, Čaputova appealed in response to fundamental Christian tenets of compassion and love. In general, a message about defending democracy and basic rights can often be more appealing than a slate of nuts-and-bolts reforms.

The populist surge is far from over. Illiberal incumbents in many countries are scrambling to cement their grip on power, while populist movements elsewhere continue to gain ground. But liberal democratic forces have shown that they can reverse this backwards march. By learning from each other, opposition parties will stand a much better chance of defeating demagogues and safeguarding democracy.