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By TNH Staff December 9, 2019

Hooded protesters use an aim laser pointer to riot police during minor clashes in Athens, Friday, Dec. 6, 2019. Thousands of protesters in Greece have joined marches in the nation's capital and other cities to mark the anniversary of the fatal police shooting of a teenager that sparked extensive rioting 11 years ago. (AP Photo/Yorgos Karahalis)

ATHENS A Greek police crackdown on violence and lawlessness, especially in the anarchist-dominated neighborhood of Exarchia is being orchestrated by the New Democracy government to get back at the Radical Left SYRIZA it ousted in July 7 snap elections, officials in the defeated party claimed.

That came in a report in TRT World, a Turkish state-run international channel after clashes in Athens on the Dec. 6 anniversary of the 2008 killing of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, who was shot dead by a police officer in Exarchia.

SYRIZA and Amnesty International accused the government of emboldening police brutality with the Leftists claiming some demonstrators were beaten and roughly treated even as police said they were being pummeled with objects.

SYRIZAs Dimitris Papadimoulis, a Member of the European Parliament, said that he planned to internationalize the issue and accused New Democracy of taking revenge on leftists and other activists opposed to its policies.

The new government is trying to hit first the young people, Giorgos Papanikoulaou, a 25-year-old left-wing student activist, told TRT World. They are trying to put a police state in every aspect of our lives.

The government had also sent in squadrons of police to rid the neighborhood of drug dealers and empty abandoned buildings of squatters, many of them refugees and migrants, trying to restore law and order.

There were battles in the street with anarchists breaking stones to toss at police, setting rubbish mounds on fire and rampaging in Athens, as well as the countrys second-and-third largest cities of Thessaloniki and Patras, leaving two injured and dozens detained.

Videos emerged showing riot police officers stomping, dragging and cursing demonstrators they had detained with a 20-year-old woman saying she was hit in the head with a police baton although she wasnt involved in the protests.The Ministry of Citizens Protection established a new committee to monitor allegations of police violence, a five-member panel that will investigate claims submitted regarding police brutality reports.

After the Dec. 6 clashes, the Hellenic Police announced that it had sent videos and photographs to the new committee in order for an investigation to be carried out.

At the same time, citizens who have relevant material or are witnesses or believe they have been subjected to violence in similar cases are invited to report to the aforementioned Ombudsman investigation mechanism, read a statement released after the incidents.

Many New Democracy lawmakers backed the police and the partys stance against lawlessness it said was tolerated and even encouraged by SYRIZA, which is riddled with anarchist and terrorist sympathizers.

Konstantinos Bogdanos, a New Democracy lawmaker, tweeted that the police crackdown demonstrates what it means to have a state at last, saying elements in SYRIZA had condoned lawlessness.

Leaving all other issues aside, there is a fundamental paradox in the policies of New Democracy, Alexis Charitsis, a SYRIZA spokesperson, told TRT World about the Conservatives.

The law and order agenda is not targeting big financial interests that are associated with corruption and organised crime. This discrepancy reveals the true nature of the law and order governmental rhetoric, he said.

Read the rest here:
SYRIZA Says New Democracy Using Cops to Get Revenge - The National Herald

Yes, I know, according to the Poll of Polls, the Conservatives are 10 points ahead of Labor. Conservatives Johnson may be a bluffer, but Labors Corbyn is irreparably tainted by association with anti-Semitism. This should all end with a nice fat double-digit Tory majority.

But here are a few reasons why Tories should curb their optimism, aside from the well-known unreliability of British opinion polls. First, history. If you count the general elections of 2010 and 2017 as wins in the sense that the Tory leader became prime minister after them, despite lacking a majority in the House of Commons the Conservatives have won the last three British general elections. The last time the Conservatives won a fourth election in a row was in 1992, when John Major only just scraped home with a majority of 21 (a result not predicted by the polls). Oh, and Major just declined to endorse Johnson.

There is no other example of four consecutive election victories in British political history.

Heres another reason for Conservative concern. Across social media platforms, Corbyn leads all other political figures in terms of both followers and engagement. On Facebook, Corbyn has 1.55 million followers compared with Johnsons 771,000. Across Facebook and Twitter, Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has more followers than Johnson. Indeed, Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has nearly as many followers as the prime minister.

Whats more, Corbyn posts to Facebook more often than Johnson, and his pages posts especially his videos are far more widely shared. The Labor leaders following on Instagram has increased dramatically during the election campaign. From Nov. 11 to Dec. 5, his follower count rose 28 percent. In the same period, Johnsons followers grew by just 9 percent.

In short, this aint over, despite what financial markets think (the pound is up to $1.31), and despite what prediction markets imply.

So what if we dont get a decisive result on Friday? What if the Tories come up just short of a majority? If you want to know what a deadlocked democracy looks like, visit the Netherlands, where it took 208 days of negotiation after the March 2017 general election to cobble together a coalition.

Or take a trip to Israel. After last Aprils election was effectively a draw, they had to have another election in September. Benny Gantzs centrist Blue and White party emerged slightly ahead of Benjamin Netanyahus Likud, but neither leader was able to form a government. Last month, Netanyahu was indicted on charges of breach of trust, bribery, and fraud. Hes still clinging on as prime minister, but it looks increasingly likely that there will need to be . . . another election.

Now ask yourself what the consequences might be if something similar happens next year in the United States?

What if the result in next Novembers presidential election is as close as it was in 2000? Remember those nail-biting days? George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore. Everything hinged on who won Florida, with its 25 Electoral College votes. On the night of the election, the networks called it first for Gore, then for Bush, then for neither. The returns showed that Bush had won the state, but by such a slender margin (just 537 votes) that state law required a recount. A 36-day legal battle culminated in the Supreme Court, which decided by five votes to four to end the recount.

Despite the strength of an economy juiced by tax cuts and easy money, Donald Trump is not a popular president. Recent polling by The New York Times gave Joe Biden a tiny edge over Trump in the key swing states Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin but gave Trump an equally slim advantage over Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Meanwhile, independent voters seem more displeased by the presidents Ukrainian skullduggery than they were by the Mueller Report. In short, this could be another close one.

In 2000, Gore ultimately accepted defeat with a modicum of grace, grew a beard, and went off to save the planet. But two decades have changed American political culture for the worse. I find it hard to imagine Trump and the MAGA-hat-wearing faithful being so stoical if he is denied a second term by hanging chads or their equivalent in Michigan especially as there is every reason to fear more foreign meddling in 2020, including direct interference with the far-from-secure voting systems in the various states. Conversely, many Democrats would lose their minds if this Supreme Court, with its two Trump appointees, voted to give Trump four more years.

Ive never played for a draw in my life, my fellow Ferguson, Sir Alex, once said. Wise words. May Boris Johnson and all voters who care for the United Kingdom heed them on Thursday. Its not just Britain that needs a win. Democracy does.

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Originally posted here:
Deadlocked democracies - The Boston Globe

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By now, we know the pattern: A constitutional democracy, flawed but in reasonably good standing, is hit by a transformative election. A charismatic new leader comes to power, propelled by the growing impatience that the electorate feels with things as they are. The leader promises to sweep away the dysfunctions of partisanship, gridlock, bureaucracy. He claims to call things bytheir right names and to speak the unspeakable. He rails against entrenched power, entrenched people, entrenched structure. He rallies the people by assuring them that the state belongs to them, only them. He wins an upset victory over the establishment forces and starts a constitutional revolution.

Around the world, liberal constitutionalism is taking a hit from charismatic leaders like these whose signature promise is tonotplay by the old rules.

Some constitutional democracies are being deliberately hijacked by a set of legally cleverautocrats, who use constitutionalism and democracy to destroy both.

When electoral mandates plus constitutional and legal change are used in the service of an illiberal agenda, I call this phenomenon autocratic legalism. (This phrase was first used by Professor Javier Corrales to describe Hugo Chvezs rule in Venezuela.)

How does one recognise an autocratic legalist in action? One should first suspect a democratically elected leader of autocratic legalism when he launches a concerted and sustained attack on institutions whose job it is to check his actions or on rules that hold him to account, even when he does so in the name of his democratic mandate. Loosening the bonds of constitutional constraint on executive power through legal reform is the first sign of the autocratic legalist.

We can spot the legalistic autocrats while they are still consolidating power because they have ambitions to monopolise power and tend to use the same toolbox of tricks.

Also read: Modis new love: Fundamental duties Indira Gandhi inserted in Constitution during Emergency

Legalistic autocrats operate by pitting democracy against constitutionalism to thedetriment of liberalism.

Until recently, illiberal leaders rejected liberalism, constitutionalism, and democracy as a package. The classic twentieth-century dictators opposed liberal democracy in favour of invocations of peoples democracies steered by a vanguard party.

Political orientation in such a black-and-white world used to be easy. Liberals were in favour of constitutionalism and democracy, and illiberals were against both. One could therefore reliably guess that a democratic and constitutional government would necessarily be liberal in practice. But that is precisely what autocratic legalism changes.

It has been said that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. The new legalistic autocrats enthusiastically support elections and use their electoral victories to legitimise their legal reforms. They use constitutional change as their preferred vehicle for achieving the unified domination of all of the institutions of state. Like the hypocrite, they befuddle their critics by pretending to support many of the same values their critics do. And, like the hypocrites misleading statements, their deployment of public values is meant to disguise that they intend just the opposite.

Instead of operating in the world of liberalism, then, autocratic legalists operate in the world of legalism.

But even when legalism undermines constitutionalism, it provides a backhanded tribute to the very constitutionalism it undermines. If making laws in a proper way were not so important for generating political legitimacy, the autocrats would not have bothered being so legalistic.

They have learned to speak the language of democratic constitutionalism while identifying its resonant-frequency points of tension and complexity in order to reverse its effects. When one points out that they have gutted liberalism in their defense of democracy, the legalistic autocrats point to examples in which some other constitutional democracy has done the same thing on some particular point without being attacked as a failed democratic or constitutional state.

Because they deploy the rhetoric of democracy and the methods of the law, observers find it hard to see the danger until it is too late.

Also read: The 10-point checklist on how to be an autocrat and heres how Modi fits the bill

How do the new autocrats get away with transforming liberal democratic constitutionalism into pure majoritarian legalism?

The first trick involves reliance on stick-figure stereotypes about illiberalism that are in peoples heads.

Theres the Hitler scenario. Then theres the Stalin scenario.

In both stick-figure scenarios, the concentration of power is brutal, complete, and completely obvious. Both narratives feature leaders who justify what they are doing in the name of a strong authoritarian ideology. Authoritarian leaders reduce those around them to puppets, brook no dissent, and leave no opposition standing.

Of course, history is more complicated than either scenario, and that is precisely the point. The bite-sized takeaway lessons from the two signature authoritarianisms of the twentieth century constitute the modern repertoire of signals that thepublic will recognise as dangerous.

The new autocrats know this and avoid repeating those well-known scenarios that will attract immediate and overwhelming reaction. They take a kinder, gentler, but, in the end, also destructive path. Their weapons are laws, constitutional revision, and institutional reform. Their ideology is often flexible. And they leave just enough dissent in play that they appear to be tolerant.

Instead of a scorched-earth policy that obliterates all opponents, one will find in these autocratically legalistic regimes a handful of small opposition newspapers, a few weak political parties, some government-friendly NGOs, and perhaps even a visible dissident or three (albeit always denigrated in the government-friendly media with compromising information real or fake so that hardly anyone can take these dissidents seriously). There is no state of emergency, no mass violation of traditional rights. To the casual visitor who doesnt pay close attention, a country in the grips of an autocratic legalist looks perfectly normal. There are no tanks in the streets.

The new autocrats achieve the look of normality by steering clear of human-rights violations on a mass scale, at least those human rights that have been entrenched in international conventions and many national constitutions.

In keeping with their concern to maintain a legitimate public appearance, it is positively useful for them to appear to have some democratic openness precisely so that they can claim that they are not authoritarians of the twentieth-century sort. They therefore tolerate a weakened opposition and other democratic signs of life, such as a small critical press or a few opposition NGOs, to demonstrate they have not completely smothered the political environment with their autocracy.

The new autocrats will therefore not look like your fathers authoritarians who want to smash the prior system in the name of an all-encompassing ideology of transformation. Portraying themselves as democratic constitutionalists is absolutely essential to their public legitimation; what is missing in the new democratic rhetoric is any respect for the basic tenets of liberalism. They have no respect for minorities, pluralism, or toleration. They do not believe that public power should be accountable or limited.

In short, liberalism is gutted while they leave the facades of constitutionalism and democracy in place. Election opponents may be harassed with nuisance criminal charges, but they do not wind up in jail, or at least not for long. Civil-society groups may be defunded, but they are not closed by the government. The press that supports the opposition is not censored, but it may be starved of advertising and then bought out by oligarchs connected to the winners. The elections that keep the new autocrats in power are rigged in technical ways behind the scenes rather than through obvious tactics that can be spotted by observers, such as ballot-box stuffing. Through these non-violent means, democracy is transformed into brute majoritarianism. The rigged elections rigged in ways that election monitors cannot see even prove that the public supports the autocrat!

The casualty here is liberalism, even as the external appearance of democracy and constitutionalism remain in place.

Also read: Many media channels have become like entertainment channels, says Shekhar Gupta

As the new autocrats get more and more clever, deploying law to kill off liberalism, constitutionalists need to educate ourselves and democratic publics about liberal constitutionalism.

First, those of us who work in the field of constitutional law have to stare into the face of the new autocracy to track in detail how it works. We need to learn to recognise the new signs of danger, which means that we need to get better at documenting the trouble cases and learning from them.

Then, we need to educate others. Civic education needs to teach people to recognise the new signs of danger. Under what circumstances is it safe to trust the appointment of judges to a political process? When is presidentialism a sign of danger? How can the discretionary use of public power for economic intimidation be curbed? Why is the call to draft a new constitution alarming? People beyond the educated elite need to know why these questions matter, and they need to learn how to think about answering them.

Law is too important to leave only to the lawyers. A citizenry trained to resist the legalistic autocrats must be educated in the tools of law themselves. Liberal and democratic constitutionalism cannot remain an elite ideal that has no resonance in the general public; that leaves this public ripe for autocratic legalists to sweep them away in the last remaining exercises of democratic power that the public may possess.

Liberal and democratic constitutionalism is worth defending, but first we need to stop taking for granted that constitutions can defend themselves.

The author is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Views are personal.

This article is an edited excerpt from the authors essay Autocratic Legalism, first published by The University of Chicago Law Review.

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Excerpt from:
Legal autocrats are on the rise. They use constitution and democracy to destroy both - ThePrint

Members of the old regime are still calling the shots

BEIRUT

THE MOST popular candidate in Algerias presidential election might be a rubbish bag. On December 12th Algerians will choose a successor to Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who stepped down in April after 20 years of dictatorial rule. Or, rather, a small minority of Algerias 41m people will choose one. Much of the country seems unenthused by the vote. In the capital, Algiers, protesters hang rubbish bags over campaign posters or replace them with pictures of jailed activists. One candidates headquarters was pelted with eggs and tomatoes. Another was forced to cancel his first campaign rally because almost no one turned up.

To hear the government tell it, the election is an important step towards democracy. It will probably be the most tightly contested presidential vote since 1995. Yet for the millions of Algerians who demanded the ousting of Mr Bouteflikaand who continue to protestit is nothing to celebrate. Instead the election demonstrates the difficulty of removing the structures that sustained the strongman.

First scheduled for July, the election was postponed amid calls for a boycott. Only two people, a veterinarian and a mechanic, registered to run. This time 23 candidates tried to make the ballot. Most failed to meet the requirements, such as collecting signatures from supporters in at least 25 provinces. The five who made it all served under Mr Bouteflikatwo as prime minister, two as cabinet members and the fifth as an MP who led a small loyalist party.

It may seem paradoxical to shun an election to support democracy. But activists say they have learned from the failed uprisings in countries like Egypt, where protesters toppled a ruler but not his regime. By the end of his long reign, the ailing Mr Bouteflika was no longer up to the task of running the country. Though he remained the figurehead, a group of men known as le pouvoir wielded power behind the scenes. They are loth to surrender it.

For the armed forces, which saw their own pouvoir curtailed in favour of businessmen close to Mr Bouteflika, the current vacuum is a chance to regain control. One of the candidates, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, a former prime minister, is thought to be close to the army chief, Gaid Salah.

The regime had hoped to simply outlast the protesters, who call themselves Hirak (movement in Arabic). That strategy has not yet worked: Algerians have demonstrated every week since February. As the election approaches the regime has turned to coercion, detaining scores of activists and journalists. Having been embarrassed in July, the authorities are determined to hold the vote. General Salah warns of foreign plots against Algeria, while the interior minister labels critics of the election as traitors, mercenaries, homosexuals.

The bigger question is what happens after December 12th. Algeria will have a new president widely seen as illegitimate. But he will still be president, with all the power that entails. Compared with other Arab countries, the repression in Algeria has been mild. The incoming president, keen to cement his grip on power, may not show such forbearance.

He will also inherit a stagnant economy. Despite its vast oil and gas wealth, Algerias per-capita income is below that of some resource-poor Arab states, such as Lebanon. Unemployment is 12% overall and much higher for young people. The finance minister recently warned that foreign reserves, which amounted to $200bn in 2014, may drop to $50bn by the end of next year. The value of oil and gas exports, which supply 60% of government revenue, fell by 13% in the first nine months of 2019. A new hydrocarbons law, meant to draw foreign investment, has been criticised by protesters and energy experts alike.

Algerians are not alone. In Sudan, Lebanon and Iraq this year angry citizens toppled their rulers but have struggled to force deeper changes. The protests cannot continue for ever. Algerias election might be a stunt to keep the ancien rgime in powerbut that does not mean it will fail.

This article appeared in the Middle East and Africa section of the print edition under the headline "Algerians fear their election will be a blow to democracy"

More here:
Algerians fear their election will be a blow to democracy - The Economist

A distant goal on the barely visible other side of a treacherous climb along a path filled with potholes, snakes and rusted spikes. Indian democracy looks a bit like that, after the recent killings in Hyderabad.

The rape and murder of a young woman in Hyderabad was gruesome enough. The response of the state, of rounding up four presumed culprits and bumping them off in a so-called encounter, was no less appalling. The response of many, particularly those in public life, who gleefully cheered the police action, is indeed horrific. Indians have to be careful while washing their skin with deep-cleansing lotions: these might peel off the entirety of the democratic sensibility they have managed to accumulate since Independence and all the markers of civilisation that set modern humans apart from savages.

Democracy is the rule of the people, by the people and for the people. That is a glib definition, sufficient for a summary that also serves as a rhetorical flourish. When the people in question are not homogeneous, but differentiated, in terms of income and education, social status and stratification, faith and ritual, and language, region and ethnicity, that definition is a mere starting point for a journey across uncharted terrain.

Democracy differentiates itself from majoritarianism by virtue of certain individual and group rights it commits itself to. The will of a temporary majority cannot breach those rights. To secure those rights, certain institutions and institutional mechanisms are integral to democracy. Due process is what we call setting those institutions and mechanisms in motion.

In Hyderabad, the four accused were killed without the benefit of due process. No person shall be convicted of any offence except for violation of a law in force at the time of the commission of the act charged as an offence, nor be subjected to a penalty greater than that which might have been inflicted under the law in force at the time of the commission of the offence, says Article 20 of the Constitution.

No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law, says Article 21. Two fundamental rights were blatantly violated by the state in Hyderabad.

When a member of Parliament, having sworn allegiance to the Constitution, calls for rapists to be lynched, she commits perjury, admits to lack of faith in the legal system and in democracy.

But what of the victim, why dont you talk about the rights of the poor girl who was so brutally killed, ask some people. Of course, those who committed the crime against the young woman deserve all the punishment that could be inflicted under the law. But first, it must be established that these four were, indeed, the ones who committed the crime.

The police have a habit of making quick arrests when the public outcry is loud against a heinous crime. Often, the accused stay in jail for a decade or so and get acquitted. The police get some relief from public anger, so what if some young men lose their youth behind bars for no reason other than that they were convenient for the police to arrest.

People hail extra-judicial reprisals when the law proves dysfunctional so goes another line of justification. Two separate rape victims from Unnao being fatally attacked by their rapists or their agents while on their way to proceedings against the rapists is clear evidence of such legal dysfunction. But is the solution to give up the law and hope for redemption either from caped crusaders who deliver vigilante justice or from law enforcers who breach the law at will?

The right to equality is yet another fundamental right. Equality can be uplifting, decidedly. But do you want equality with those unfortunate souls who are picked up by the police and locked up for crimes the police are under pressure to solve but lack the needed competence to? Clearly not. If you still want to celebrate the working of death squads, you believe not in equality but in social hierarchy: of different groups with differential rights, mentally ensconcing yourself within the elite lot immune to such arbitrary violence at the hands of the state.

When the rule of law matters no more, who takes the hit can be entirely arbitrary. Who is in power changes, so does who is in the line of fire.

India has a democratic Constitution, thanks to the political leadership at the time of Independence. Indian society lags far behind the Constitution, with a sensibility tempered by the segmented solidarity of religion, caste and region. To transcend primordial urges that valorise vengeance over justice and immediate gratification over the slow but sure working of institutional mechanisms, people must identify themselves with the larger collective that has agency in democracy, that is, the people of India. But when politics turns sectarian, such identification crumbles.

Lynch mobs and those baying for the blood of those accused of crimes but with unproven culpability, are signs of the strains on Indias as yet fledgling democratic project.

Read the original:
View: What the Hyderabad encounter tells us about the state of India's democracy - Economic Times