The meaning of democracy

Sitting down to write about the siege on democracy while images of Russians voting appear on screens is poetic justice. We call the cardboard stage sarcastically organized by Vladimir Putin's regime legislative elections. The new tsar has been at the center of Russian power for 27 years thanks to methods learned in the KGB. The systematic elimination of dissent, of civil and political opposition, and of free media, along with a predatory instinct, have turned him into a totalitarian leader who swims in corruption. After internally drowning any symptom of democratic development and wiping out the oligarchs and the opposition, Putin has been waging a war against Ukraine for four years, with Chinese acquiescence, which he is now expanding to the whole of Europe. The advantage of totalitarians is that social control has no costs. Especially for a paranoid and icy mind like that of the Russian president, who is determined to turn into reality the territorial expansion that only connects with a glorious past in his imagination.

Putin's little theater coincides with multiple signs of the hybrid war against Europe and with the need to rethink international disorder and democratic alliances. This is the objective of the CIDOB international yearbook for the year 2027, which attempts to provide keys to interpret the global agenda and focuses on the core of what we are facing: the siege on democracy.

The reality is that we have traumatically rediscovered that democracy is not irreversible and that its weakness is also its greatness: it needs someone to sustain it. It does not survive because there are elections, constitutions, judges, press, or parliaments. All of this is necessary, but not sufficient. Democracy needs citizens who believe in it, institutions that do what is expected of them, governments capable of managing well, and societies that still think there is a future and that it is built collectively.

Today we know that democracies can erode without anyone closing Parliament. It is enough for a particularly corrosive feeling to take hold: helplessness, hopelessness about the future.

As the Canadian academic and former politician Michael Ignatieff clearly says in an interview with ARA: active citizenship is not a complement to the system. It is one of its conditions. A living democracy needs citizens who do not normalize the unacceptable.

If citizens and institutions are essential, so is the efficient management that prevents the mechanisms created to stop abuse from ending up making action impossible. That “vetoes” in the form of internal controls end up paralyzing.

We also need mentally stable leadership capable of thinking about the collective and not chasing shadows. We had never had so much wealth in so few hands and with so little intention of thinking in plural. Large fortunes today have money, platforms, audiences, and the capacity to modify the public conversation. But Ignatieff warns that there is a confusion that should be avoided: wealth is not intelligence and even less democratic legitimacy.

Today there are too many issues that do not admit delay and that are transversal to many countries: uncontrolled artificial intelligence, the aging of the population, how to make the welfare state and humanism compatible with mass immigration, the climate crisis, defense when the USA withdraws, access to housing, productivity. These are challenges that require complex, often unpopular, and almost always long-term decisions. And they clash with fragile governments, short electoral calendars, and an accumulation of vetoes from the system itself. If democracy is not useful, it will not transform reality and perhaps will not even survive.

Here we enter into an even deeper question that Ignatieff talks about: the crisis of the future.

Authoritarianisms offer false, grandiloquent, or downright delusional futures. They promise national restorations, imaginary pasts, absolute order, homogeneous identities. But they do offer a narrative.

Democratic politicians must be able to explain what they want to build in order to mobilize the citizens who will guarantee the survival of democracy.