Americans no longer live in a liberal democracy: this is the conclusion of the Swedish institute V-Dem, which monitors and classifies the world’s democracies according to the health of their institutions. The organization periodically measures how countries implement the constitutive principles of the democratic ideal: free elections; guarantee of fundamental freedoms; citizen participation; decision-making processes with effective deliberation; and full political equality.
Strictly speaking, , which sees the northern power in a clear process of autocratization, only summarizes the political collapse underway since he returned to the White House. The indicators are unequivocal: rapid and gigantic concentration of power in the federal Executive; dismantling institutional checks and balances; disrespect for civil rights and equality of all before the law; attempts to silence the media, dissenting voices and academia; threat of suppression of free associations.
According to the Gothenburg-based institute, the most dramatic decline of democratic institutions in America is underway. Only the electoral rules remain intact: the USA is today an electoral-only democracy.
Because now those rules are the president’s domestic target, at the same time committed to destroying the international architecture designed to ensure peace, when possible. In fact, the integrity of the elections has always been in Trump’s sights. He never abandoned the fallacious speech that attributed his victory in 2020 to fraud at the polls.
Upon returning to the White House, he attempted, through an executive order — the equivalent of a Brazilian presidential decree — to impose federal control over the elections and multiply demands that would in fact limit the right to vote. It was blocked by the Judiciary, which considered the maneuver illegal.
Soon, the Senate will consider the “SAVE America Act” —in capital letters, in the best Trumpist style for social media—, which resumes, with different phrasing, the intentions of the failed executive order. If approved, it will become more difficult for voters to register and vote in federal elections — which, according to critics, could deprive some millions of political citizenship, to the detriment, above all, of the Democratic Party.
The goal of the coup is to ensure the victory of the Republican and his party in the legislative elections in November this year and in the presidential election in 2028. But the rhetoric that justifies it is part of a strategy common to populists with the ambition of autocrats.
It is about casting suspicion on established electoral rules and procedures, fueling citizens’ disbelief, creating insurance against a future defeat at the polls and justification for, if necessary, contesting it “by force”. Such speech is proof that, for populists, electoral democracy is a path to power, not a way of limiting its exercise. Therefore, it is an intrinsically unstable system: either it is associated with a regime of freedoms and checks and balances on the concentration of power, or it becomes an anteroom for authoritarianism.
It’s hard to imagine the US occupying its current position in the next edition of the V-Dem report.
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