Rare Bad Month

For the World’s Autocrats, June Was a Rare Bad Month

Around the world, democracy has had a resurgence. Now are U.S. voters willing to step up?

By FRIDA GHITIS

Frida Ghitis writes about world affairs. She is a contributing columnist for the Washington Post, a regular contributor to CNN.com and a weekly columnist at World Politics Review.

Amid the rapid rise of strongman governments in one country after another, and the slow collapse of democratic values in some of the globe’s biggest powers, there’s a bit of good news: June was an absolutely terrible month for autocrats.

The past few weeks have dealt unaccustomed blows to men who are used to winning crushing victories against their foes, and against the spirit of openness in their nations. After more than a decade of global autocratic drift, the strongman leaders of China, Russia, and Turkey all suffered the near-simultaneous reverses.

It’s much too early to call this a turning point, but with the world in the midst of what Freedom House calls a “consistent and ominous” pattern of democracy in retreat, the events of the past month offer a ray of hope that autocracies’ built-in weaknesses, including politically driven economic decision-making, along with the human reaction to political repression, can gradually chip away at closely held power.

The most powerful Chinese leader in decades, President Xi Jinping, saw plans to advance Beijing’s creeping control of Hong Kong face a ferocious popular pushback unlike any since the United Kingdom handed over the territory to China in 1997.

Hong Kong residents turned out in staggering numbers—2 million by organizers’ count—to protest an extradition bill that would have allowed authorities to transfer suspects to China’s notoriously politicized judicial system. Demonstrators demanded that Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, withdraw the proposed legislation. The memory of the Tiananmen Square massacre, whose anniversary was June 4, and Xi’s ongoing repression of Chinese Uighurs, cast the stakes in sharp relief: Political protests can be life-threatening, but allowing Beijing to start plucking suspects out of Hong Kong risked smothering political freedoms.

Those freedoms are supposed to be guaranteed under the 1997 handover agreement. But Beijing has been steadily capturing the levers of power. So, it was a harsh blow to Xi when protesters forced Lam, known by some as Xi’s puppet, to back down.

Xi has been watching from the sidelines, but the protests are coming to him. When he arrived in Osaka for the G-20 meeting, Hong Kong activists were already there. They want world leaders to raise their concerns during the summit meetings. China categorically refuses to discuss the topic.

Xi may get some sympathy from another autocrat in attendance in Osaka, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Like Xi, Putin is not used to seeing the public challenge him and emerge victorious. But he, too, experienced a dose of anger from his own people.

When security forces arrested an investigative reporter and manufactured phony drug charges against him, Russians reacted with fury. Putin has largely managed to suppress independent media, and many journalists critical of the government have died under mysterious circumstances. So the arrest of Ivan Golunov, a reporter for the Latvia-based Meduza covering political corruption and organized crime, wasn’t surprising—but the reaction was. His detention seemed to strike a nerve, to drop a last straw on the mountain of frustrations. Normally acquiescent business publications splashed a headline across their front pages, “We are all Golunov,” while protesters, at great personal risk, surrounded police headquarters demanding his release. Incredibly, Golunov was let go, all charges dropped.

It was a stunning reversal for the government, perhaps a sign that Putin is growing nervous. Things are not going so well. The nationalist fervor that followed his annexation of Crimea has cooled. Polls show that large numbers of Russians no longer trust him, especially now that the economy is stagnant. When he held his annual televised call-in show, a question somehow got through producers, flashing on television screens across the country. “Only one question,” it read, “When will you go away?”

If Putin and Xi are not used to losing, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has possibly even less experience with defeat. But Erdogan, who has been steadily dismantling Turkish democracy—like Putin, leveraging his popularity to rewrite the rules and take control of powerful institutions--just suffered a devastating blow to his support.

It all started in March, when Turkey held municipal elections. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, AKP, lost in the country’s biggest cities. When Erdogan saw that his handpicked choice to lead Istanbul had lost by a thin margin — just 13,000 votes — he claimed the results were fraudulent. He easily persuaded the subservient electoral commission to cancel the results.

Istanbul is not only the country’s largest, most important city. It is also where Erdogan was born and rose to power, eventually becoming the most powerful Turkish leader in a century. But not unlike the situation with Putin, Erdogan’s assault on democratic institutions, his near-obliteration of critical media, and his increasingly authoritarian rule became much more troubling to millions after the economy stopped growing. The president’s brazen refusal to accept their first vote for mayor angered the people of Istanbul.

When the revote was held last weekend, the opposition candidate, Ekrem Imamoglu of the Republican People’s Party, CHP, won a landslide victory over the president’s man. It was a humiliating outcome for the president. Thousands who had voted AKP the first time switched, giving Imamoglu a margin of more than 800,000 votes. For the first time in 25 years, Erdogan’s home town is not in the hands of his political party. And now several of Erdogan’s former allies say they will form their own parties to challenge the AKP. Turks called it an “earthquake.” A besieged opposition paper declared optimistically, that “one-man rule,” had been “thrashed.”

So now what? Democracy activists in Hong Kong and mainland China, in Russia and Turkey, know that the victories of the past few weeks are no guarantee of ultimate success. Strongmen tend to be ruthless and canny; challenging them is dangerous and difficult. And yet, those who have just managed to succeed are daring to hope that they’re seeing tipping point—and that they can reverse the tide of democracy’s retreat.

Americans, too, are facing a kind of tipping point—one that will have reverberations in all these countries. Normally, this would be a good moment for Washington and its democratic allies to use their leverage in support of pro-democracy movements—and indeed, the U.S. Congress is doing so, introducing the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which calls for U.S. sanctions if Beijing curtails Hong Kong’s freedoms. The ultimate fate of the bill may depend on what happens to bilateral relations, now hinging on trade negotiations.

But the support of the United States for global democracy is less clear under the current administration than it has been for some time. This is something voters could have a say in—and, if they don’t, the week’s good news could prove to be a mere bump along the road to further erosion of democracy.