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By: News of Bangladesh

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Last week, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's declared that Turkey would not 'succumb to the Jewish lobby'.

Every month now, we get treated to another anti-Semitic blast from Turkey's leadership, which seems to be running some kind of slur-of-the-month club. Who knew that Jews all over the world were busy trying to take down President Recep Tayyip Erdogan?

Last week, it was Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's turn to declare that Turkey would not "succumb to the Jewish lobby" among others supposedly trying to topple Erdogan, the Hurriyet Daily News reported.

This was after Erdogan had suggested that domestic opponents to the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, were "co-operating with the Mossad", Israel's intelligence arm.

So few Jews, so many governments to topple.

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Davutoglu's and Erdogan's cheap, crude anti-Semitic tropes, which Erdogan relies on regularly to energise his base, are disgusting.

For the great nation of Turkey, though, they're part of a wider tragedy. It is really hard to say any more that Erdogan's Turkey is a democracy. Even worse, it is necessary to say that Turkey's drift away from democracy is part of a much larger global trend today: Democracy is in recession.

As Stanford University democracy expert Larry Diamond argues in an essay titled Facing Up to the Democratic Recessionin the latest issue of the Journal of Democracy: "Around 2006, the expansion of freedom and democracy in the world came to a prolonged halt. Since 2006, there has been no net expansion in the number of electoral democracies, which has oscillated between 114 and 119 (about 60 per cent of the world's states).

"The number of both electoral and liberal democracies began to decline after 2006 and then flattened out. Since 2006, the average level of freedom in the world has also deteriorated slightly."

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Democracy's recession deepens as autocrats power back in Turkey and Russia

In Africas year of elections, with democracy in retreat in many parts of the continent, Lesotho is a pygmy beside giants like Nigeria and other larger nations facing votes.

But many observers are watching the small mountain nation as it heads to the polls Saturday, one of just a handful of African countries that in the past has seen a peaceful democratic handover of power from one party to another.

Lesotho's democratic credentials are in question after an attempted coup in August forced Prime Minister Tom Thabane to flee the country.

Saturdays balloting is supposed to resolve the crisis, if friction between political opponents and rival branches of the security forces doesnt derail the process.

Among the other countries facing elections this year are Sudan, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Tanzania, Mali, Burkino Faso, Burundi, Chad, Niger, Mauritania, Guinea, Central African Republic, Togo and Mauritius.

Jeff Smith, an Africa specialist at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, said Lesotho's election is significant because the nation of 2 million had been a leader in democracy, press freedom and human rights in Africa, as other parts of the continent had seen a backslide in democratic values.

Lesothos important because, despite its problems last August, it is often regarded as a democratic standard-bearer throughout Africa, said Smith. Its got a pretty big reputation to uphold.

He said Lesotho was one of the freer countries, as democratic gains are peeled back in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

We have what Id describe as a democracy recession. Theres a really worrying trend of leaders peacefully stealing elections, said Smith, citing subtle methods such as the manipulation of voter rolls by incumbent parties to maintain a grip of power without using outright violence.

The most dangerous sign as Lesotho heads to the polls is the politicization of the security forces. In last years crisis, the police supported Thabane while the army supported a rival.

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Why Lesotho's election is a crucial test for African democracy

In times of war, Athenian voters agreed to spend 15 times more on the armed forces than they did on state pay or festivals.

Is democracy good for balancing a budget? For many, today, the answer is a resonating no. This answer is easy to understand. In the birthplace of democracy, Greece, the state's budget is a mess. For too long the politicians of modern Athens feared voters would not tolerate the financial truth. To pay for unaffordable election promises, they borrowed irresponsibly instead of raising taxes. They lied to voters about the ballooning public debt. It all ended in a huge sovereign-debt crisis.

Even in the midst of this crisis, Greek politicians were afraid to tell voters how the country could escape it. They left it to Greece's creditors to dictate harsh austerity policies, which have caused enormous personal suffering. Greek voters did not vote for them. Not without reason, they are incredibly angry with their politicians.

Politicians do not believe voters can tolerate the financial truth. They assume that democracy is not good at managing public finances. For them it can only balance the budget by leaving voters in the dark.

Greece's crisis might be exceptionally severe but the problem behind it is not unique to Greek democracy. Two other modern democracies, Australia and Britain, were also forced to take drastic budget measures in response to the global financial crisis. In each democracy, centre-left politicians borrowed heavily to pay to prop up the banks and maintain private demand. In each country, these expansionary policies minimised the crisis's human impact. But in the elections that followed, the left-of-centre politicians who had introduced these policies refused properly to justify them. They feared that voters would not tolerate frank public debate about public finances.

The centre-right politicians who opposed them were no better. In these elections they promised to bring budgets back into surplus without new taxes or major public-sector cuts. But these promises again turned out to be lies. In office these conservative politicians have introduced austerity policies without clear electoral mandates. They too continue to face the wrath of their electorates. For good reasons the voters of Australia and Britain have lost a lot of trust in what politicians say about public finances.

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In all these democracies there has been a common underlying problem. Politicians do not believe voters can tolerate the financial truth. They assume that democracy is not good at managing public finances. For them it can only balance the budget by leaving voters in the dark.

As an historian of ancient Greek democracy, this assumption strikes me as plainly wrong. Certainly the politicians of ancient Athens did not share it. Ancient Athens was an incredibly successful state. It developed democracy to a higher level than any other state before the modern period. It was the leading cultural innovator of its age. Athens became one of the ancient world's greatest military powers. These successes did not come cheaply. They depended on Athenian democracy's ability to raise new taxes and control public spending. What made these successes possible was the sound management of public finances.

That the democracy of ancient Athens was good at this will come as a surprise. Germans have been critical of Greek public spending for a very long time. In 1817, August Bockh famously criticised ancient Athens for spending more on public-sector pay and cultural festivals than on its armed forces. For this German professor, this wasteful spending weakened ancient Athens's armed forces. It made it possible for Greece to be conquered by Macedonia.

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If ancient Greeks could balance a budget, why can we?

China is a political force to be reckoned with. Photo: AFP

Politics Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalisation of Democracy FRANCIS FUKUYAMA Profile, $49.99

On the eve of the collapse of the Soviet empire, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama pronounced the global victory of the idea of American-style "liberal democracy". Nearly three decades later, things look grim for his "end of history" thesis, though close readers of his new book will surely conclude that although his thinking has since become guarded by qualification, and by convolution, his old story of American triumph hasn't fundamentally changed.

Political Order and Political Decay is the second volume of Fukuyama's investigation of the origins, evolution and decay of political institutions. Its lengthy argument can be summarised in a single sentence: without the prior establishment of a well-armed and functional territorial state, and without an independent judiciary responsible for overseeing the rule of law that robust state power then makes possible, modern liberal democracy cannot happen. No state, no rule of law, no democracy is the complex algorithm that structures the book, in support of his view that liberal democracy centred on free elections remains the world's No. 1 political preference.

Political order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama Photo: Jason Steger

Fukuyama admits of specific troubles in the house of democracy, but they are seen as remediable (how they're to be fixed, he doesn't say). The bigger historical picture is different, and the future bright. His unaltered conviction is that liberal democracy has the winds of long-term evolutionary trends in its sails. Long term is important to Fukuyama, above all because the modern territorial state has become the indispensable kingpin of political order. If there is no state, there can be no rule of law, or liberal democracy.

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Fukuyama's point can be read as a backdoor critique of the farcical American-led failure to build functioning states in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. It's also a sobering reminder that liberal democracy can't be built by liberal democratic means. It requires the establishment of political order through the state, followed by the imposition of legal restraints on state power. Only then can free elections take root and flourish among people living inside territorial states.

Fukuyama reminds his readers that liberal democracy is the offspring of the modern territorial state. The end result proved advantageous in several ways: it reduced civil wars; legalised and legitimated social divisions; enabled the growth of civil society, and facilitated the grand-scale enfranchisement of peoples for whose welfare it provided. And in international affairs, fixed state boundaries provided room for manoeuvre for any given liberal democracy.

Liberal democracy in state form has certainly had downsides. In the violent business of state building, peoples who lacked the capacity to become a modern state were typically left behind, as "stateless people" and "asylum seekers"; or they became the raw material of colonisation, or victims of forcible removal and outright annihilation.

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Francis Fukuyama sticks to his guns on liberal democracy