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NOT POSITIVE": In recent years, free elections in several countries have caused the left to lose power. Now SVT claims that the "level of democracy" is the lowest in the world since the Soviet Union - because more people than ever get to vote.
SVT: Threat to democracy that people are allowed to vote
Published 22 January 2024 at 08.02
FOREIGN. That more countries than ever allow general elections is a threat to democracy, reports state-run SVT. It happens that people vote incorrectly, according to the television giant, whose message is that democracy is not only about people being able to choose their leaders, but rather about something else.
- Getting the right political leaders in place, explains SVT's expert Gunilla Reischl.
"Never before in history have so many people had the opportunity to vote in various elections as in 2024. But the fact that half the world holds elections does not only have to be positive for the development of democracy," states SVT on news site.
The TV giant then turns to some experts who are allowed to problematize the classic definition of democracy, which says that democracy means precisely people's rule with free and secret elections.
Changed definition
In recent years, the media and authorities in the EU and the US have adopted a different, more modern, definition of democracy. According to this, democracy does not mean that a population votes for its leaders in general elections, but the population must also vote for liberal or socialist parties for the countries to be counted as democracies.
According to this view, Hungary, for example, does not count as a democracy, because the governing party there is neither socialist nor liberal, only popularly elected. Last year, the EU Parliament therefore voted through a resolution that states that Hungary is not a democracy but a "hybrid regime", even though the country, unlike Sweden, has never been accused of lacking free and secret elections.
Even SVT has now stopped calling democracies democracies and instead uses the wording "countries with elections" to include those democracies where the population votes right.
"Half the world's population lives this year in countries with elections," states reporter Oscar Gyllander in the SVT feature on Sunday, where the message is that the record-high level of popular rule in the world actually means that democracy is in decline.
Back to the Soviet Union
Despite the fact that more people than ever live in countries with elections, the situation for "democracy" is, according to the SVT feature, "back at the same levels as before the fall of the wall". The TV giant is referring to the year 1989, when half the earth's surface was controlled by the Soviet Union and other dictatorships.
The level of democracy is not determined by whether the population can choose their leaders or not, but by how loyal the elected government is to "the global goals", "work with the climate" and "the transition", is the message of the feature. And then it's not about the population getting to choose their leaders in general, but about something else.
- Getting the right political leaders in place, who can work for the transition, explains Gunilla Reischl, who is a left-wing academic at the Foreign Policy Institute and an expert on democracy at SVT.
At the same time, SVT rolls heartbreaking images in the background where vulnerable refugees are seen trying to cross the Mediterranean, while disturbing archive images are shown of the likes of Jörg Haider, the Berlin Wall and Nigel Farage.
cloudsandwind
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