We tend to think of democracies dying at the hands of men with guns. During the Cold War, coups d'etat accounted for nearly three out of every four democratic breakdowns. Military coups toppled Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi in 2013 and Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014. In cases like these, democracy dissolves in spectacular fashion. Tanks roll in the streets. The president is imprisoned or shipped off into exile. The constitution is suspended or scrapped.
By and large, however, overt dictatorships have disappeared across much of the world. Violent seizures of power are rare. But there's another way to break a democracy: not at the hands of generals, but of elected leaders who subvert the very process that brought them to power. In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez was freely elected president, but he used his soaring popularity (and the country's vast oil wealth) to tilt the playing field against opponents, packing the courts, blacklisting critics, bullying independent media, and eventually eliminating presidential term limits so that he could remain in power indefinitely. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán used his party's parliamentary majority to pack the judiciary with loyalists and rewrite the constitutional and electoral rules to weaken opponents. Elected leaders have similarly subverted democratic institutions in Ecuador, Georgia, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Ukraine, and elsewhere. In these cases, there are no tanks in the streets. Constitutions and other nominally democratic institutions remain in place. People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance. This is how most democracies die today: slowly, in barely visible steps.
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