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By Alain Touraine

Democracy these days is more commonly defined in negative terms, as freedom from arbitrary actions, the personality cult or the rule of a nomenklatura, than by reference to what it can achieve or the social forces behind it. What are we celebrating today? The downfall of authoritarian regimes or the triumph of democracy? And we think back and remember that popular movements which over threw anciens rgimes have given rise to totalitarian regimes practising state terrorism.

So we are initially attracted to a modest, purely liberal concept of democracy, defined negatively as a regime in which power cannot be taken or held against the will of the majority. Is it not enough of an achievement to rid the planet of all regimes not based on the free choice of government by the governed? Is this cautious concept not also the most valid, since it runs counter both to absolute power based on tradition and divine right, and also to the voluntarism that appeals to the people's interests and rights and then, in the name of its liberation and independence, imposes on it military or ideological mobilization leading to the repression of all forms of opposition?

This negative concept of democracy and freedom, expounded notably by Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, is convincing because the main thing today is to free individuals and groups from the stifling control of a governing lite speaking on behalf of the people and the nation. It is now impossible to defend an antiliberal concept of democracy, and there is no longer any doubt that the so-called "people's democracies" were dictatorships imposed on peoples by political leaders relying on foreign armies. Democracy is a matter of the free choice of government, not the pursuit of "popular" policies.

In the light of these truths, which recent events have made self-evident, the following question must be asked. Freedom of political choice is a prerequisite of democracy, but is it the only one? Is democracy merely a matter of procedure? In other words, can it be defined without reference to its ends, that is to the relationships it creates between individuals and groups? At a time when so many authoritarian regimes are collapsing, we also need to examine the content of democracy although the most urgent task is to bear in mind that democracy cannot exist without freedom of political choice.

Revolutions sweep away an old order: they do not create democracy. We have now emerged from the era of revolutions, because the world is no longer dominated by tradition and religion, and because order has been largely replaced by movement. We suffer more from the evils of modernity than from those of tradition. Liberation from the past interests us less and less; we are more and more concerned about the growing totalitarian power of the new modernizers. The worst disasters and the greatest injury to human rights now stem not from conservative despotism but from modernizing totalitarianism.

We used to think that social and national revolutions were necessary prerequisites for the birth of new democracies, which would be social and cultural as well as political. This idea has become unacceptable. The end of our century is dominated by the collapse of the revolutionary illusion, both in the late capitalist countries and in the former colonies.

But if revolutions move in a direction diametrically opposed to that of democracy, this does not mean that democracy and liberalism necessarily go together. Democracy is as far removed from liberalism as it is from revolution, for both liberal and revolutionary regimes, despite their differences, have one principle in common: they both justify political action because it is consistent with natural logic.

Revolutionaries want to free social and national energies from the shackles of the capitalist profit motive and of colonial rule. Liberals call for the rational pursuit of interests and satisfaction of needs. The parallel goes even further. Revolutionary regimes subject the people to "scientific" decisions by avant-garde intellectuals, while liberal regimes subject it to the power of entrepreneurs and of the "enlightened" classes the only ones capable of rational behaviour, as the French statesman Guizot thought in the nineteenth century.

But there is a crucial difference between these two types of regime. The revolutionary approach leads to the establishment of an all-powerful central authority controlling all aspects of social life. The liberal approach, on the other hand, hastens the functional differentiation of the various areas of life politics, religion, economics, private life and art. This reduces rigidity and allows social and political conflict to develop which soon restricts the power of the economic giants.

But the weakness of the liberal approach is that by yoking together economic modernization and political liberalism it restricts democracy to the richest, most advanced and best-educated nations. In other words, elitism in the international sphere parallels social elitism in the national sphere. This tends to give a governing elite of middle-class adult men in Europe and America enormous power over the rest of the world over women, children and workers at home, as well as over colonies or dependent territories.

One effect of the expanding power of the world's economic centres is to propagate the spirit of free enterprise, commercial consumption and political freedom. Another is a growing split within the world's population between the central and the peripheral sectors the latter being not that of the subject peoples but of outcasts and marginals. Capital, resources, people and ideas migrate from the periphery and find better employment in the central sector.

The liberal system does not automatically, or naturally, become democratic as a result of redistribution of wealth and a constantly rising standard of general social participation. Instead, it works like a steam engine, by virtue of a big difference in potential between a hot pole and a cold pole. While the idea of class war, often disregarded nowadays, no longer applies to post-revolutionary societies, it still holds good as a description of aspects of liberal society that are so basic that the latter cannot be equated with democracy.

This analysis is in apparent contradiction with the fact that social democracy developed in the most capitalist countries, where there was a considerable redistribution of income as a result of intervention by the state, which appropriated almost half the national income and in some cases, especially in the Scandinavian countries, even more.

The main strength of the social democratic idea stems from the link it has forged between democracy and social conflict, which makes the working-class movement the main drivingforce in building a democracy, both social and political. This shows that there can be no democracy unless the greatest number subscribes to the central principles of a society and culture but also no democracy without fundamental social conflicts.

What distinguishes the democratic position from both the revolutionary and the liberal position is that it combines these two principles. But the social democratic variant of these principles is now growing weaker, partly because the central societies are emerging from industrial society and entering post-industrial society or a society without a dominant model, and partly because we are now witnessing the triumph of the international market and the weakening of state intervention, even in Europe.

So Swedish social democracy, and most parties modelled on social democracy, arc anxiously wondering what can survive of the policies constructed in the middle of the century. In some countries the trade union movement has lost much of its strength and many of its members. This is particularly true in France, the United States and Spain, but also in the United Kingdom to say nothing of the excommunist countries, where trade unions long ago ceased to be an independent social force. In nearly all countries trade unionism is moving out of the industrial workplace and turning into neocorporatism, a mechanism for protecting particular professional interests within the machinery of the state: and this leads to a backlash in the form of wild-cat strikes and the spread of parallel ad hoc organizations.

So we come to the most topical question about democracy: if it presupposes both participation and conflict, but if its social-democratic version is played out, what place does it occupy today? What is the specific nature of democratic action, and what is the "positive" content of democracy? In answering these questions we must first reject any single principle: we must equate human freedom neither with the universalism of pragmatic reason (and hence of interest) nor with the culture of a community. Democracy can neither be solely liberal nor completely popular.

Unlike revolutionary historicism and liberal utilitarianism, democratic thinking today starts from the overt and insurmountable conflict between the two faces of modern society. On the one hand is the liberal face of a continually changing society, whose efficiency is based on the maximization of trade, and on the circulation of money, power, and information. On the other is the opposing image, that of a human being who resists market forces by appealing to subjectivity the latter meaning both a desire for individual freedom and also a response to tradition, to a collective memory. A society free to arbitrate between these two conflicting demands that of the free market and that of individual and collective humanity, that of money and that of identity may be termed democratic.

The main difference as compared with the previous stage, that of social democracy and the industrial society, is that the terms used are much further apart than before. We are now concerned not with employers and wage-earners, associated in a working relationship, but with subjectivity and the circulation of symbolic goods.

These terms may seem abstract, but they are no more so than employers and wage-earners. They denote everyday experiences for most people in the central societies, who are aware that they live in a consumer society at the same time as in a subjective world. But it is true that these conflicting facets of people's lives have not so far found organized political expression just as it took almost a century for the political categories inherited from the French Revolution to be superseded by the class categories specific to industrial society. It is this political time-lag that so often compels us to make do with a negative definition of democracy.

Democracy is neither purely participatory nor purely liberal. It above all entails arbitrating, and this implies recognition of a central conflict between tendencies as dissimilar as investment and participation, or communication and subjectivity. This concept can be adapted to the most affluent post-industrializing countries and to those which dominate the world system; but does it also apply to the rest of the world, to the great majority of the planet?

A negative reply would almost completely invalidate the foregoing argument. But in Third World countries today arbitration must first and foremost find a way between exposure to world markets (essential because it determines competitiveness) and the protection of a personal and collective identity from being devalued or becoming an arbitrary ideological construct.

Let us take the example of the Latin American countries, most of which fall into the category of intermediate countries. They are fighting hard and often successfully to regain and then increase the share of world trade they once possessed. They participate in mass culture through consumer goods, television programmes, production techniques and educational programmes. But at the same time they are reacting against a crippling absorption into the world economic, political and cultural system which is making them increasingly dependent. They are trying to be both universalist and particularist, both modern and faithful to their history and culture.

Unless politics manages to organize arbitration between modernity and identity, it cannot fulfil the first prerequisite of democracy, namely to be representative. The result is a dangerous rift between grass-roots movements seeking to defend the individuality of communities, and political parties, which are no more than coalitions formed to achieve power by supporting a candidate.

The main difference between the central countries and the peripheral ones is that in the former a person is defined primarily in terms of personal freedom, but also as a consumer, whereas in the latter the defence of collective identity may still be more important, to the extent that there is pressure from abroad to impose some kind of bloodless revolution in the form of compulsory modernization on the pattern of other countries.

This conception of democracy as a process of arbitration between conflicting components of social life involves something more than the idea of majority government. It implies above all recognition of one component by another, and of each component by all the others, and hence an awareness both of the similarities and the differences between them. It is this that most sharply distinguishes the "arbitral" concept from the popular or revolutionary view of democracy, which so often carries with it the idea of eliminating minorities or categories opposed to what is seen as progress.

In many parts of the world today there is open warfare between a kind of economic modernization which disrupts the fabric of society, and attachment to beliefs. Democracy cannot exist so long as modernization and identity are regarded as contradictory in this way. Democracy rests not only on a balance or compromise between different forces, but also on their partial integration. Those for whom progress means making a clean sweep of the past and of tradition are just as much the enemies of democracy as those who see modernization as the work of the devil. A society can only be democratic if it recognizes both its unity and its internal conflicts.

Hence the crucial importance, in a democratic society, of the law and the idea of justice, defined as the greatest possible degree of compatibility between the interests involved. The prime criterion of justice is the greatest possible freedom for the greatest possible number of actors. The aim of a democratic society is to produce and to. respect the greatest possible amount of diversity, with the participation of the greatest possible number in the institutions and products of the community.

Alain Touraine in theUNESCO Courier

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What is democracy? - UNESCO

On June 20, Armenias citizens will be heading to the polls for a second snap parliamentary election in less than three years. While the December 2018 snap election was held in the aftermath of a popular revolution and brought Nikol Pashinyan to power, the forthcoming election is taking place against the backdrop of a disastrous six-week war with Azerbaijan and the continued demands by opposition groups for Pashinyans resignation. The triggers of the two snap elections were greatly different in nature, but equally important: The 2018 elections were about the promise of democratic consolidation while the June 2021 elections are about the future security of the country.

The September to November 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh ended with Armenia agreeing to what many observers in the country perceived as a humiliating capitulation, resulting in a shift in the power balance between the two neighbouring countries. After the initial shock of defeat, demonstrators started gathering in Yerevan, Armenias capital, demanding the resignation of Pashinyan, calling him a traitor, and questioning his ability to provide safety and security to Armenia proper. Despite their best efforts, the demonstrators were not able to gather enough critical mass to force Pashinyan to resign.

In March 2021, however, Pashinyan finally buckled under growing political pressure and hinted that snap parliamentary elections could be held before the end of the year. A month later, he resigned and the National Assembly refused to elect a new PM, officially triggering a snap election.

After the date of the snap election was announced, Armenias political landscape witnessed a major whirlwind where existing political parties started coalescing to form electoral blocs. Eventually 26 political groups four electoral blocs and 22 parties were officially registered to run. The frontrunners among these groups are Pashinyans Civil Contract Party and the main opposition Armenia Alliance headed by former President Robert Kocharyan. According to recent opinion polls, Civil Contract and Armenia Alliance are within a margin of error of each other to take the lead.

Many contenders will be taking part in the upcoming snap election for two main reasons. First, the crushing defeat Armenia faced in the war provided an opportunity for various political forces to challenge Pashinyans otherwise popular regime. Second, the incumbent administration, which has been in power for less than three years, does not yet have enough control over administrative resources to sway the upcoming election in its favour and make its reelection a foregone conclusion. This second point is especially important because, in almost every election that has taken place in Armenia in the past 25 years, incumbents have managed to utilise administrative resources to guarantee their and their allies victory, thus discouraging smaller parties from running.

With most of the parties having already published their electoral platforms, it is clear that the main issues in the June snap election are national security and the future of Armenias negotiations with Azerbaijan, especially the negotiations on the border demarcation between the two countries. In recent months, as border tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan increased, the issue of border security started to dominate the political and public discourse in Armenia.

As national security became a leading concern for many Armenians, support for Kocharyan and his alliance increased in public opinion polls. This is largely due to the former president projecting himself as a more seasoned statesman and juxtaposing that with Pashinyans lack of experience both in foreign policy and national security domains. The fact that Kocharyan has always presented himself as a wartime leader he was the leader of the self-declared republic of Nagorno-Karabakh in the 1990s and has been highlighting those credentials in his campaign has made him and his alliance an obvious choice for most undecided voters and for those who view the countrys national security as a priority.

That being said, it should be noted that Kocharyan is carrying a lot of baggage from his time as Armenias president (1998-2008). He is, for example, conveniently omitting from his election campaign the fact that during his tenure as president he did not take initiatives to solve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict peacefully even though he had an opportunity to do so.

Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, many in Armenia still hold Kocharyan responsible for the police using deadly force to disperse demonstrators in the aftermath of the 2008 presidential election. It was during these protests that Pashinyan himself was active as a member of the opposition and was briefly imprisoned. When he became prime minister, Pashinyan ordered an investigation into Kocharyans responsibility for the March 2008 violence that resulted in the deaths of two police officers and eight protesters.

Finally, a major question in the minds of many people is the role, if any, Russia would play in the upcoming elections. All indicators show that Moscow is in no rush to support either Pashinyan or Kocharyan. Russia, having established boots on the ground in Nagorno-Karabakh in the form of Russian peacekeepers, has become the de facto security guarantor of not only that region but also of Armenia itself. Moreover, Russias hold over Armenias embattled PM, along with the close ties Kocharyan has with Moscow, make the election results of no consequence for Russias strategic interest in Armenia.

The above factors raise the possibility that the upcoming elections will be more about the personal rivalry between Pashinyan and Kocharyan than determining the path Armenia will follow in the post-war era.

Additionally, many citizens are starting to believe that on June 20 they will be making a choice between ensuring national security and protecting democracy. Indeed, some observers argue that the difference between the two major political forces is that one side is democratic (Pashinyan) and the other, anti-democratic (Kocharyan).

However, the reality is that regardless of who wins these elections, democracy will be the biggest loser and democratic reforms will be curtailed in Armenia. Continuing to argue that democracy and security are incompatible and are mutually exclusive may lead Armenia to lose on both fronts.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.

Originally posted here:
Armenia Elections: Democracy and security on the ballot - Al Jazeera English

The recent war between Hamas and Israel was a perhaps unnecessary reminder of the problem that Hamas control of Gaza brings--to Gazans, Israelis, and all Palestinians. It's obvious that Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has no solutions to offer, and his most recent move was to cancel parliamentary elections yet again. None have been held since 2006, and he himself was elected in 2005--for a four year term now reaching its 17th year. It's also clear that neither Israel nor Egypt wishes to "conquer" Gaza and take full responsibility for the area and its populace.

What then are the options? This is the subject of a symposium in Mosaic Magazine, building on an analysis by former Israeli ambassador tothe United States and Knesset member Michael Orenentitled "How Gaza Became Israel's Unsolvable Problem."

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Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

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My own contribution is called "What Can Be Done Politically To Weaken Hamas."It begins this way:

Americas interests in Gaza are threefold: to alleviate the humanitarian suffering of the Palestinians living there, to strengthen Israels security, and to see an end to the control of the Gaza Strip by a terrorist group increasingly allied with Iran. Hamas stands in the way of all three, and the end of Hamas control of Gaza should underpin Americas strategy in the region over the coming years. How can this be won?

Pressure Points

Abrams gives his take on U.S. foreign policy, with special focus on the Middle East and democracy and human rights issues.

I thenargue thatthe "only possible way to remove or at least badly undermine Hamas in the long run is political: it is by reducing its level of support, building up support for alternative groups, and preventing it from ruling by sheer force. A key problem today is that there is no alternative that is more attractive to Palestinians."The goal should be to undermine Hamas by showing Gazans, over time, that there are better alternatives than perpetual rule by an Islamist proxy of Iran, and moreover, that those alternatives are real and indeed are visible in the West Bank. This is admittedly a long-term approach and one that may fail, but there are no short-term approaches that offer any real change.

The idea, I conclude, is to give Palestinians an open choice between Hamas and decent government without corruption and terror. It is a choice they have never had except in the few months after Arafat died.

My argument, and those of Amb. Oren, former Israeli National Security Adviser Gen. Yaacov Amidror, and Gen. Amos Yadlin, and others can be found at Mosaic.

More on:

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Palestinian Territories

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Read the rest here:
Can Democracy Help Solve The Problem of Gaza? - Council on Foreign Relations

An Iranian motorcyclist rides his motorcycle past an electoral banner for the conservative politician, head of Iran's judiciary, and Irans June 18 presidential elections candidate Ebrahim Raisi, in downtown Tehran on June 3. (Morteza Nikoubazl / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

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Theres a running joke among Iranians that the Iranian political system must be far more advanced than the one in the United States; months after the US election millions of Americans doubt the winner, but months before the Iranian election, everyone was certain who the winner was going to be.

Iran has begun an electoral process in which the vote, scheduled for June 18, is predetermined and where voter participation will likely be at a record low. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei appears to have handpicked Ebrahim Raisi, a hard-liner who is head of the judiciary, to succeed Hassan Rouhani as president.

This has never happened before in Iran, and since 1997when Mohammad Khatami, a reform-minded long-shot candidate, won the presidencyelections have been especially unpredictable and dramatic. Khatami continued to defy the odds by winning another mandate in 2001 against conservative candidates. Four years later, a relative unknown backed by Khamenei named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad upended the prior arrangements. While ostensibly a right-wing extremist, he secretly harbored anti-establishment sentiments. In the meantime, a popular democratic movement called the Green Movement, born of the 2009 election, shook the system for more than a year.

In 2013 and 2017, another reformist candidate, Hassan Rouhani, ran on a platform of joining the global order, de-escalation, and rolling back social and religious strictures. He easily defeated the hard-line candidates arrayed against him, including Raisi.

On all these occasions, spontaneous popular mobilization emerged from below. The regime tolerated it as a price to pay for maintaining its legitimacy and a display of its popular sovereignty.

These past elections have not been fully democratic. Women are barred from running, and candidates must be vetted by a process in which only those hailing from the religious elite are ultimately allowed to run. Still, elections provide opportunities for internal regime dissenters to voice their views and even get elected.

Mass participation in an electoral process has been a cornerstone of the Islamic Republic from the beginning. In 1979, the electorate voted to abolish the monarchy. This is a legacy of the republics founder, Ruhollah Khomeini, who was adamant that veering from this model would betray his vision. The current supreme leader, Khamenei, has until now followed the same formula. Elections confer both legitimacy and an internal dynamism to the system, which has likely prolonged the rule of the clergy against formidable odds.Current Issue

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Informal opinion surveys indicate that the participation rate, which normally averages around 70 percent of the electorate, is expected to fall below 35 percent, perhaps even to the lower 20s.

If the election is allowed to go ahead under these circumstancesthere is always a chance Khamenei could reverse the process by decreea pillar of the clerical system, namely its republican element, will be permanently impaired. Once voters fall out with a political establishment, they may not be easily nudged back to the ballot box. This kind of fissure, as the republics founder repeatedly emphasized, could endanger the Islamic regime in the long run.

Raisi is a 61-year-old mid-ranking clerical judge who is now poised to reach the highest echelon of theocratic establishment in the Islamic Republic. At seminary schools, first in the city of Mashahd and then at the holy city of Qum, he became a devout follower of a clergyman named Noorollahian who later became an aide to the custodian of the Imam Reza Shrine, one of the nerve centers of the clerical regime. At age 23, he married the daughter of the future Friday prayer leader of the city of Mashhad, a hard-line cleric named Ahmad Alamolhoda. Both his teacher and his father-in-law played key roles in his meteoric rise in the clerical-juridical firmament. Thanks to these connections as well as his talent for political maneuvering, he raised himself through the ranks of the juridical system with bewildering speed. Starting out as assistant prosecutor and inspector of the revolutionary courts in the provinces, he soon became top prosecutor in a city 30 miles west of the capital. At the ripe age of 25, Raisi found his way to Tehran, where he took up a post as assistant to the chief prosecutor general of the Revolutionary Courts, Ali Razini. Two years later, in 1988, he was invited to join the so-called Committee of Death to mete out death sentences to thousands of political prisoners who refused to renounce their political or ideological beliefs. This was in the last months of the IranIraq War in which a sense of fear and paranoia pervaded the entire regime.

After joining the Committee of Death, it was smooth sailing to top-tier jobs like inspector general of the Judiciary, chief prosecutor at the Special Court of the Clergy and, for the last three years, the top justice at the Judiciary.

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But until now, people believed that the Committee of Death had been just three judges. Few people knew that Raisi was in fact a fourth judge, who presided over the proceedings. This surprising development was revealed in August 2016 through the efforts of the family of a deceased dissident cleric named Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri.

In August 2016, Montazeris family released a taped message of a meeting in which the dead cleric admonished the Committee of Death members for their bloody misdeeds. He said, History will condemn us [for this], and the names of those responsible will be written in history as criminals. Raisi has routinely evaded addressing the charges, preferring instead to blame Khomeini for the orders and minimize his own role.

The selection of Raisi as Irans de facto strongmanat a time when there are persistent rumors of the deterioration of the supreme leaders healthis a puzzling choice. On the upside, his past record of fighting tirelessly for the interests of the clerical establishment endears him to the large array of factions and groupings that come under the umbrella of Principalist or Conservative forces. A series of setbacksincluding loss of elections to the hated reformists, the betrayal of Ahmadinejad, the killing of Qasem Soleimani, the economic meltdown, and the divisive nuclear accordhave demoralized these hard-line factions in recent years, and they have been seeking out a unifying charismatic figure like Raisi to restore confidence in their ideology.

In addition to this, for the last few years, Raisi and his team have crafted an image of him as an incorruptible crusader for the little guy. The state-run television frequently airs footage of his visits to courthouses, closed factories, and dispossessed peasants lots in which he is seen railing against government misconduct. In all this coverage, he tries to appear unassuming and troubled by injustice. Sometimes he orders new rulings against a prior judgment on the spot. On his website, he states that he has dismissed hundreds of corrupt judges and public prosecutors in his capacity as the chief of the Judiciary.

Still, the fact that he will have won the presidency in an uncompetitive and lopsided manner is sure to tarnish his reputation with the electorate for years to come.

Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the leader of the Green Movement who has been under house arrest for over a decade, expressed his solidarity with those boycotting the election. Calling the vote staged, he decried the butchering and total elimination of republicanism.

Even the two major reformist-clerical groupingsthe Militant Clerical Society and the Theological Teachers and Researchers Societywhich have always encouraged people to vote in the past, no matter how undemocratic the conditions, are refraining from endorsing candidates. The Theological Teachers called the election cosmetic. In a statement issued by the group on May 26, it warned that the Guardian Council and some elements outside it are bent on creating a mono-factional rule.

At the same time, Raisis appalling human rights recordspecifically his role in the murder of thousands of political prisoners in the summer of 1988is a major liability for him and his backers. It is not inconceivable that the International Court of Human Rights at The Hague could take up a case against him litigated by lawyers of the victims families and find him guilty.

There were many indications that decision makers had opted for a norm-defying course of action weeks before the announcement of the list of approved candidates. On May 4, a spokesman for the Guardian Council, the oversight entity charged with vetting candidates, announced that it had changed the rules for selecting candidates even though a constitutional amendment is supposed to be needed for such a change. Then, a few days later, another spokesman declared, Well, the people as well as national and political anticipations always expect to see a large rate of participation in the election. However, on strictly legal and statutory grounds, a low participation poses no problem for the credibility and legitimacy of the elections.

Finally, on May 26 when the Guardian Council rolled out its final list of approved contenders for the 2021 election, one name, aside from the current vice president and other reformist candidates, was absent: Ali Larijani, a three-term parliamentary spokesman, former secretary of the Supreme National Supreme Council, and special adviser to the supreme leader. Larijani was believed to be the only candidate who could have defeated Raisi. (Three of the six lay jurists in the Guardian Council had been placed there by Raisi himself.)Related Article

It is little wonder that few people will turn out for the June 18 vote. Even those who believe a monolithic leadership has a better shot at bringing the country out of its economic morass and therefore support Raisi may not vote; his victory is already foreordained.

The voting bloc that has consistently prevented the country from going fully theocratica coalition of students, young people, secularists, and middle-class voters who come together briefly during electionsis now boycotting the election. They saw their hopes dashed under the reformist presidency of Hassan Rouhani, whose second term saw an economic depression that devastated the livelihood of tens of millions of the same people that were the chief backers of the reformists. The damage was so calamitous that even if the massive sanctions imposed by Donald Trump were to be lifted today, it would take years for many people to rebuild their lives.

On top of that, two major waves of protests by the unemployed and the working poor were put down in an exceedingly violent manner, further alienating the voters from the reformists.

With the loss of faith in reformists and the absence of any viable candidates to challenge the official establishment candidate, it was an opportune moment to do away with the republican element of the regime. This move would have elicited massive waves of protest just three or four years ago but was met with a collective yawn. According to a poll by Mehdi Nasiri, a former hard-line activist and publicist, 70 percent of those polled said they wouldnt take part in any form of election because they saw no point in doing so.

Absent any major developments, the trend is here to stay. According to some experts, among them a prominent Iranian sociologist named Taghi Azad Armaki at the University of Tehran, most Iranians want reform, and so even a hard-line administration occupying all three branches of the government will be forced to moderate its radicalism. I believe that Conservatives would have to follow the reformist path, Armaki told the newswire IRNA. However, if the election becomes unpolarized, it becomes monolithic and therefore turns the act of criticism into one of opposition. Like most Iranians, Armaki doesnt see the election as creating immediate dangers for the regime, but he said it will strain the system.

Another academic from Azad University, who requested anonymity, predicted a darker future for Iran. He told me that he anticipated further militarization, increased repression, and more confrontations with other countries: If Raisi wins, which seems more than likely now, I see a short period of retrenchment and relative peace followed by very serious deterioration of the conditions both domestically and internationally with unforeseen consequences for everyone.

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Irans Incredible Shrinking Democracy - The Nation

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There has lately been an uptick of articles in the media, particularly the Western media, warning about the impending end of Indias democracy. Concurrently, many officials in Indias ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have engaged in illiberal rhetoric toward minorities. The government has acted in authoritarian ways toward social media, most recently attempting to intimidate Twitter in an attempt to censor voices critical of the governments handling of the COVID-19 crisis. Indias rank in democracy indexes has subsequently dropped.

For example, a recent article in Responsible Statecraft stated that the Modi government demolished the secular foundations of Indian democracy, replacing it with a Hindu state in which non-Hindus are at best tolerated, dangerously mixing truths with falsehoods. An uninformed reader could be forgiven for thinking that Indias democratic constitutional disposition had been abolished and replaced with a fascist dictatorship la Hitler. While, on one hand, it is certainly true that the rhetoric and actions of the BJP would lead one to that conclusion, it is also true, on the other hand, that the Indian state, built on the basis of the 1949 constitution, has not been replaced. This would be like arguing that the former U.S. President Donald Trumps rhetoric and incitement amounted to the replacement of the U.S. government and constitution with a racist dictatorship.

In reality, reports of the collapse of Indias democracy are often alarmist and misinformed. Indias institutions particularly the courts remain strong; democracy remains vibrant especially at the local and state levels, where the BJP has been defeated multiple times and where opposition parties control many governments and most importantly, its society remains heterogeneous, thus inhibiting a centralized tyranny. India is a far cry from being a one-party state.

It is important, however, to differentiate between democracy and liberalism.

In an interview with journalist Yascha Mounk, Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, noted that despite some institutional erosion in the past few years:

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there is a sense, still, that the ultimate strength of India is a free and fair election, which is partly why the BJP pulled out all the stops to try and win the [recent] West Bengal [state] election to try and show, we can do it there also, in the stronghold of Mamata Banerjee, the leader of the opposition there. We can beat her. The people love us. And theyre showing that to us. The BJPs current leadership flourishes under the sense that theyre liked by everyone, under every circumstance.

Democracy in India is strong and entrenched, especially at the state level. A bigger problem is the lack of a competent political party that could challenge the BJP on the national level. The party that used to fill this role, the Indian National Congress, or simply the Congress Party, has its own set of problems. While it avoids much of the ethno-religious rhetoric of the BJP, it lost legitimacy because of its history of stifling bureaucratic policies, its role serving as a front for feudal interests, and most damaging, its own anti-democratic dynastic politics. The BJPs emergence had much to do with its promise of development and competence rather than its core Hindu-nationalist ideology, which only appeals to a relatively narrow base. The BJPs platform for development and good governance is why ambitious politicians have defected to it from the Congress Party. Minus Prime Minister Narendra Modis charisma, it is not self-evident that the BJP would have staying national power. India is sorely in need of a functional alternative to the BJP that can provide an alternative to that party at the center.

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The BJPs inability to handle the COVID-19 crisis and get much done is not just a reflection of its own capabilities, but a reflection of Indias weak state, an institutional deficiency that results in the state not being able to get much done. This phenomenon goes back thousands of years, as I have previously discussed at The Diplomat. Democracy works extremely well for Indias society, because it is the means by which different identity groups in a highly heterogeneous society can share and balance power. It prevents any individual or group from becoming too strong and imposing their will on the customs of other groups. Indias post-independence constitution and the entrenchment of federalism and ethnic-based states has merely perpetuated a system that will never look like Chinas centralized, totalitarian state. Indias very diversity itself pushes back against any democratic backsliding.

However, despite Indias democratic norms and heterogeneity, Indias society is not particularly liberal, and this is reflected in the actions of its elected governments. Indias famed tolerance is more a function of different caste, religious, and ethnic groups maintaining a peaceful coexistence with each other rather than converging into a shining melting pot (outside of certain circles and big cities). Tolerance is not celebration and oneness.

Todays cultural and social trends are not necessarily evidence of democratic backsliding, but are rather evidence of social norms in India that are illiberal toward speech, individual expression, and criticism. As the political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote, individual freedom in India has been limited much more by things like kinship ties, caste rules, religious obligations, and customary practices. But in some sense, it was the tyranny of cousins that allowed Indians to resist the tyranny of tyrants. Indias democratically elected rulers, from all parties and on all levels union (central), state, and local behave in an illiberal manner because the society from which they spring is in many ways illiberal, sociologically speaking. Parties across the ideological spectrum have resorted to censorship, libel cases, and intimidation by the police. Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of the state of West Bengal, whose party, the local All India Trinamool Congress, was recently lauded for defeating the BJP, has herself often intimidated critics. The desire of every local potentate to carve their own fief is a strong factor that prevents any party from establishing an authoritarian government at the central level.

Ultimately, many in the media and among activists want to see a version of India come into being that accords with their own preferred vision, rather than dig deeper into the complexities of Indias history and sociopolitical evolution. It is not conducive to an accurate analysis of Indias politics to view it through the dichotomous lens of democracy versus authoritarianism, and of freedom versus fascism. Political systems are in a constant state of change based on the dynamics of the actors and institutions involved, and there is no one particular endpoint. For example, the English and then British political system witnessed numerous battles for power between royal authority and the nobility, then between the king and parliament, and then between the established and working classes before becoming what it is today.

There is every reason to believe that a society as diverse as Indias will likewise witness a constant tug-of-war between various groups, political parties, regions, and institutions, and that it is unreasonable to expect India to develop a Western-style liberal democracy right off the bat, if ever. India will continue to evolve in a direction that will probably be both relatively democratic given democracys enormous popularity and legitimacy in the country but also relatively illiberal, given political and social attitudes. But Indias democracy and constitutional order will remain strong and resilient, with its ethnic heterogeneity, regionalism, and multiplicity of groups providing a cushion against the entrenchment of authoritarianism, even if this is expressed in terms of group identities rather than individual rights.

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Why India's Democracy is Not Dying The Diplomat - The Diplomat