Democracy seems to face a gigantic problem with popular formation when the basis for informed and factual political opinion is weakened like this. In Europe, for example, vaccine skepticism now runs together with right wing nationalist contempt for democracy, which aligns closely with immigration, bordering on racism. This is one way to make right wing extremism mainstream. Let us now look more closely at the autocratic turn. Names like Xi in China, Modi in India, Putin in Russia, Maduro in Venezuela, Erdogan in Turkey, Orbán and Kaczynski in Hungary and Poland, Bolsonairo in Brazil and Duterte in the Philippines and now Ferdinand Marcos.
They are all judging by this anti democratic turn since The post Castroist regime in Cuba is also part of the trend, not to forget Assad in Syria, Al Sissi in Egypt, and the regimes in Sudan, South Sudan and Somalia, which have never be democratic. In Algeria, all temptations whatsapp mobile number list to democratization have stagnated. Even in Tunis, where the Arab Spring took hold, it seems that democracy has been replaced by a strong presidential power that threatens the reforms. The United States sees all these tendencies in pure form. Trump belongs to the same right wing family.
Calling Boris Johnson an autocrat is perhaps not so apt. But the demagogic, populist methods he put forward during Brexit nevertheless remind one of a temperament with authoritarian tendencies and a penchant for strongman cultivation compare his astonishment on these pages at his hero, Churchill, about whom he has written a book Both Trump and Johnson left behind a scorched earth in their countries, a combination of incompetence and idiosyncrasy. Both believe that politics is also about character, which they both lacked who helped to bring them down.