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ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack. This is 7am.

2024 will be democracy’s biggest year.

Over four billion people could head to the polls, from major battles in the US and India, to fierce contests in South Africa and Indonesia.

One person watching this closely is Anne Applebaum. She’s someone who was calling out authoritarianism spreading around the world, while western leaders were still shaking hands with Vladimir Putin.

So, where could the world’s politics be heading this year?

Today, Pulitzer Prize winning historian and contributor to The Atlantic Anne Applebaum on democracy’s biggest test, and how it can survive.

It’s Friday, February 2nd.

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Audio excerpt – News Reporter in India:

“Narendra Modi has taken the craze, and he’s playing like a batsman in supreme form. The Prime Minister on Thursday kicked off his campaign for the 2024 election…”

Audio excerpt – News Reporter in South Africa:

“The ruling South African ANC African National Congress party held its election manifesto review in Soweto Sunday…”

Audio excerpt – News reporter in Russia:

“Vladimir Putin saying he will run again for President…”

Audio excerpt – Vladimir Putin (translation):

“I will not hide the fact that at different times I had different thoughts. Now you’re right, this is the time when a decision needs to be made. I will run for the post of President of the Russian Federation…”

ANGE:

Anne, there are so many elections coming up this year and when we take a look at who’s running for election. There are a lot of candidates on the various ballots that people have described as being authoritarian. You’ve got Modi in India, of course Trump in the US. Russia is having an election. What do you think this year could tell us about where our politics might be heading? Do you think we’re seeing a kind of global shift to the right?

ANNE:

I wouldn't describe it as a global shift to the right. I would describe it as people reacting to their sense of chaos and cacophony by choosing autocratic leaders.

And so, for example, in Mexico, the issue is not the emergence of an autocratic far right, but of an autocratic left. So you have a you have a the current president of Mexico is would describe himself as left-wing comes from the Mexican left.

Audio excerpt – Speaker:

“So an extreme leftist and a nationalist will be the next president of Mexico, he won in a landslide, his name is Andrés Manuel López Obrador.”

ANNE:

And has been someone who has pushed back on transparency in Mexico, has tried to undermine the independent judiciary, tried to in Mexico, has an independent electoral body that judges and organises elections. He tried to undermine that.

Audio excerpt – News Reporter:

“Critics say the changes threaten the independence of Mexico's National Electoral Institute, or INE which oversees federal elections.”

ANNE:

He can't be on the ballot because Mexico has one term presidents, but he has a successor. And she is thought to be carrying on those ideas.

So it is true that you see an undermining of democratic institutions in a lot of different ways and different places. The issue is that all of these elections are still taking place, in a world in which we really haven't got to grips with the way conversation and political debate have been changed by social media and also by changes in the mass media.

The way we now speak, and this is true whether it's in Indonesia, which also has an election this year, or in India, which has an election this year, or in the US or anywhere else, it's almost as if the infrastructure of our conversation, the rules by which it's taking place now emphasise emotion and anger, and political division.

Audio excerpt – The crowd:

“You’re on the wrong side!”

ANNE:

you have you have extreme polarisation now of a kind that you didn't have before in the United States

Audio excerpt – The crowd:

“We want trump! We want trump!”

Audio excerpt – The crowd:

“Find this flag, tear it up”

ANNE:

Groups of people now see one another, when they look across the aisle at the other political party, they don't see competitors, they see enemies, people who are evil, who want to change the nature of their country.

Audio excerpt – The crowd:

“Save your country, vote Trump!”

ANNE:

And you have that phenomenon really. And, you know, I won't say every country, but in many countries.

ANGE:

And some of the candidates with some of these authoritarian tendencies, no matter where they sit in their politics, are proving to obviously be incredibly popular, even though a lot of them undermine some of the core values of democracy.

I mean, even in Trump's case, he talks about kind of ripping it up. How do we explain their popularity? You know, why do people vote in free and fair elections for candidates who seem to want to undermine some of those core values?

ANNE:

I mean that’s a long, it’s a hard question. There's an answer that is economic that's to do with the creation of inequality and the hollowing out of, you know, industry.

There's a cultural explanation you know the way we talk about politics has changed. They believe that their country. This is very true in the United States, people believe the United States is a disaster, that it's chaos, that it couldn't be worse, that the situation is so bad that we need to, we need a revolution.

And so that some of the language that you used to hear on the Marxist left in the United States, you now hear on the American far right, you know, we need to destroy everything and start again.

Audio excerpt – Donald Trump:

“After this…we’re gonna walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re gonna walk down, we’re gonna walk down, anyone you want, but I think right here we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol!”

ANNE:

You need to bring something to an end, so that we can change everything. And, you know, where does that sense of chaos and catastrophe come from? and of course, these things feed on each other.

Audio excerpt – Donald Trump:

“You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”

ANNE:

Politicians learn how to inculcate or to, or to talk to that kind of person or to that kind of mood. And of course leaders are important, individuals are important. I think if we had if Trump were to lose the Republican primary and Nikki Haley were to win, I think you'd have a very different political conversation in the United States.

So, there are underlying factors that can then be taken advantage of by particular people, and they're also particular people who can worsen the conversation. But, you know, they interact with each other.

ANGE:

And Anne, you’ve written about democracy before, and warned that any society can turn against democracy. Do you worry about how much trouble the whole world is in and if democracy is dying?

ANNE:

My argument wasn't that democracy is dying, but that it's challenged. And that we've taken it for granted, that we've assumed for too long that it was something like water coming out of the tap. You know, you don't have to think about the water where it comes from. You just turn on the tap and it comes out. Whereas in reality, democracy, you know, you have to walk ten miles to the well and take the water out and carry it back.

And we were, we didn't take care of it. We didn't think about it. We let a lot of institutions die. We let a lot of civic institutions die. And we didn't think about the consequences.

And so there's nothing inevitable about democracy. Historically in the past, most democracies have ended. But of course it's not, neither is the decline isn't inevitable either. If people mobilise, if people understand the stakes, if people involve themselves in, in politics and in campaigns and in creating institutions, then then it can survive.

ANGE:

After the break - how one country brought its democracy back from the brink.

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ANGE:

Anne, you’ve spent your career writing about the rise of what we might call a new kind of authoritarianism, where we see these autocratic individuals get elected and then threaten democracy.

And you’ve actually seen how this happens up close, in your adopted home of Poland, where your husband is a politician. Can you take us back to the time in Poland where things started to shift, politically?

ANNE:

So in 2015, a political party that calls itself the Law and Justice Party won an election largely using a conspiracy theory.

Audio excerpt – News Reporter:

“The day of the crash is seared in Polish history. One of those occasions when every Pole remembers where they were.”

ANNE:

So there had been a plane crash in Poland a few years before.

Audio excerpt – News Reporter:

“The Polish Air Force plane came down in Smolensk in Russia. It claimed not only the lives of all 96 passengers and crew on board, but the country's political and military elite.”

ANNE:

The president was killed in a plane crash. And the president's twin brother is the leader of the Law and Justice Party. Once the party won, they almost immediately began this procedure of state capture.

Audio excerpt – News Reporter:

“For the first time since the end of communism. A democratically elected government has a majority and is busy implementing its own brand of patriotic Christian conservatism.”

ANNE:

They started with the courts. They illegally removed the leaders of the courts. They changed the way the judges were chosen.

Audio excerpt – News Reporter:

“And who judges the judges, in short, judges appointed by the ruling party hostile to those who oppose its judicial reforms.”

ANNE:

They took over state media. They made it into kind of party political, very, very partisan, very aggressive, form of media.

Audio excerpt – News Reporter:

“To many Poles, TVP could just as well stand for Televisia Propaganda….”

ANNE:

So it's as if ABC or the BBC had been taken over by one party and made into a kind of extremist version of itself.

Audio excerpt – News Reporter:

“It is pushed back against issues like gay rights and has resisted EU initiatives to share the burden of migration.”

ANNE:

In short, they were pushing Poland in the direction of autocracy. They were trying to create a political system in which they would never lose.

And honestly, when we, we had an election here in Poland, I'm in Poland right now. We had an election last year. I was pretty sure that they would win again.

And I think they believed their own propaganda and they thought they wouldn't lose. And so they were very unprepared when they did actually lose.

ANGE:

It's interesting that you, as you know, someone who spends their life thinking and writing and talking about these issues you were convinced, you know, that they were going to get re-elected. And then the opposite happened. Why had you lost so much faith in the opposite outcome coming true?

ANNE:

It's funny, we were, I was just talking about this with some friends last night. I was convinced they would be re-elected. Then after the election, I was convinced they would try to hang on to power, but they didn't manage to get themselves organised.

I spent a lot of time looking at places where democracy has failed. And I know, you know, I've seen the many different ways in which it can fail. But, yes, I was pleasantly surprised by the power of this democratic spirit.

And it was possible because of a very, very large turnout. So if normally we get about 60% of people voting, we got 74%. And there was an especially notable turnout among young people and especially young women.

And that was a turned out to be a complete game changer and that they voted for three different parties. There was a centre left party, a centre party and a centre right party. And those three parties created the coalition that was larger than this autocratic party. And now, actually, we're watching in Poland a kind of counterrevolution.

As the current prime minister in the current coalition, try to put back together the Constitution. And it's pretty messy. It's a big, long running, difficult argument and it's going to take a couple of years. But, it is a kind of lesson. And the lesson is about engaging people and finding new ways to reach people and finding different ways of talking to people and reminding people of what it is that they can lose.

Because I think what happened in Poland after eight years, people did begin to understand what they were losing, and they could see, you know, they saw the creeping takeover of the institutions. They saw it at the local level, they saw it at the national level. And enough people were worried by it that they voted.

ANGE:

And I guess you're saying it provoked enough anger amongst the electorate to, for them to then turn on that party and vote them out. I'm wondering if that is likely to be kind of a short term reaction. You know, Trump was elected, but then he wasn't. But now this year he might be re-elected again. I'm wondering how long lasting that anger that is provoked by some of these leaders really lasts.

ANNE:

I don't think I can write you a rule for it. But you're right, it is a little bit why Trump lost, I mean, in some of the issues played out the same way as in Poland. People were sick of his chaos and they were tired of his anger.

And of course, the abortion issue plays very strongly, also in Poland, and in the United States, partly because people care about abortion rights, but also because it's particularly, again, for women and younger women and younger people. It's evidence of how the loss of power works. And you've lost power. You've lost control. You, here's a set of decisions you're not going to get to make because you have the, you know, this autocratic government. And so I think it had a big impact.

But I think it's very important for people who live in democracies, who are lucky enough to have a democratic political system because some people don’t. It's very important to remain engaged, you know, find a way of being involved in politics.

The societies that are best defended against populist language or authoritarian language are those that are the most engaged and where civic institutions are the strongest. So maybe there'll be some good news from this year's elections. And from the good news, we should study the examples and spread them, bring them home.

ANGE:

Anne, thanks so much for your time.

ANNE:

Thank you.

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ANGE:

Also in the news today…

Pakistan's former Prime Minister, Imran Khan, has been sentenced to 14 years in prison for corruption charges, just one day after a separate court gave him a 10-year prison sentence for leaking state secrets.

Khan and his wife, Bushra Bibi, who has also been sentenced to 14 years in prison, had been accused of keeping and selling state gifts including jewellery and watches.

And

Approvals to export Australian-made military equipment to Israel are reportedly being stalled, as concerns grow over the rising number of civilian casualties in Gaza.

According to the ABC, a defence industry insider says the Albanese government appears to be deliberately ‘going slow’ on approving Israeli military equipment requests, with many remaining unanswered.

7am is a daily show from The Monthly and The Saturday Paper.

It’s produced by Kara Jensen-Mackinnon, Zoltan Fecso and Cheyne Anderson.

Our senior producer is Chris Dengate. Our technical producer is Atticus Bastow.

Our editor is Scott Mitchell. Sarah McVeigh is our head of audio.

Erik Jensen is our editor-in-chief.

Mixing by Andy Elston, Travis Evans, and Atticus Bastow.

Our theme music is by Ned Beckley and Josh Hogan of Envelope Audio.

I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am. We’ll be back again next week.

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