Trump and other threats to democracy in 2024

Sam Hawley: It's a little hard to fathom, but by the end of this year, Donald Trump could be elected President of the United States again. It's going to be hard to look away over the next 10 months of campaigning. What's unfolding in the US will get a lot of attention. But it's worth noting 2024 is the year of elections. From Indonesia to the UK, Russia and India, around half of the global population will be eligible to vote this year. So, democracy must be thriving, right? Well, it's not that simple. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal Land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily.

Yana Gorokhovskaia: My name is Yana Gorokhovskaia. I'm the Research Director for Strategy and Design at Freedom House. And Freedom House is an American-based NGO that tracks freedom and democracy across the world.

Sam Hawley: Yana, there are more elections this year than ever before in history. That's in itself a pretty big deal, isn't it?

Yana Gorokhovskaia: Absolutely. There's so many people going to the polls to decide on so many issues this year. And those elections will have huge ripple effects too for what happens sort of internationally as well.

Sam Hawley: And it's a huge test for democracies and democratic values. And we're going to discuss that in a moment. But we need to start, I think, in the United States.

Chanting at Trump campaign rally: We love Trump! We love Trump! We love Trump! We love Trump!

Donald Trump, fmr US President: We love you and we love you. We all love you.

Sam Hawley: This is the election everyone will be watching. It will dominate coverage because it's looking more and more likely, of course, that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee.

Donald Trump, fmr US President: We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.

Donald Trump, fmr US President: We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.

Donald Trump, fmr US President: We will evict crooked Joe Biden from the White House on Election Day 2024.

Sam Hawley: I want to ask you, if Donald Trump is re-elected and becomes president again in November, what sort of consequences could that have for the world and for democracy?

Yana Gorokhovskaia: Well, I think the thing that we're tracking and the thing that we're watching is really the conduct of the election and the rhetoric around democracy and election integrity that comes along with it. And those two things are really important for the world because we know that the US and what happens in the US really matters for democracy movements, for activists, for political opposition in other countries that look to the United States for inspiration, but also really for financial and technical support. And we also know that authoritarians falsely point to America's problems as proof that democracy is inherently inferior. And so when democracy is sort of talked down about inside the United States, I think it boosts that kind of rhetoric abroad.

Sam Hawley: All right. Well, Donald Trump has been using increasingly extremist language and he's even stated that he'd be a dictator, but just for a day.

Donald Trump, fmr US President: I said, I'm going to be a dictator for one day. We're going to do two things. The border, we're going to make it so tight you can't get in unless you come in legally. And the other is energy. We're going to drill, baby, drill. After that, I'm not going to be a dictator.

Sam Hawley: So not really very democratic sort of talk. President Joe Biden has labelled him a threat to democracy.

Joe Biden, US President: Trump's assault on democracy isn't just part of his past. It's what he's promising for the future. He's being straightforward. He's not hiding the ball.

Sam Hawley: Is he right? Is Donald Trump a threat to democracy?

Yana Gorokhovskaia: Well, I think there's a couple of really important issues here. One is that, you know, definitely rhetoric around an election matters and any kind of calls to violence or calls to political violence are really worrying. And we've seen an escalation of threats of violence against election workers, against judges, against politicians. We've seen actually an escalation of real violence, of people turning on each other, of different political opinions. And that's all really worrying because what you don't want in a democracy is for people to fight each other or fight about the rules. You really want people to be committed to the system. And so I do think that Trump's rhetoric undermines some of that commitment to elections as an institution of democracy. And, you know, in terms of election integrity, election denialism, those things also matter. We see the ripple effects of that. We saw, you know, President Bolsonaro in Brazil talk about, you know, elections are rigged in case if he lost. So these things are, they matter. It matters what kind of rhetoric happens in the United States. You know, the United States democracy has deteriorated over the last 10 years, and that has been both under Republican and Democratic administrations. And a lot of the problems have to do with kind of decline in civil liberties, including freedom of the media, but also really polarisation and partisanship. And so there's a lot at stake this year with the election.

Sam Hawley: Yeah, all right. One concern, of course, during this US election will be interference. The sort we saw in 2016 from Russia, and Russia evidently will be going to the polls this year as well, but of course there won't be a truly democratic vote there. How big a worry is interference in the US election this time around, do you think?

Yana Gorokhovskaia: Well, I think what we saw with the interference in 2016 is that election institutions and the administration of elections actually proved to be quite resilient and able to track interference and make sure that election integrity was preserved. But that doesn't undercut these sort of foreign influences, and especially rhetoric around why democracy doesn't work or doesn't deliver, or any kind of rhetoric that amplifies polarisation or division, or really just threatens elections from the outside. You know, Taiwan just had its presidential election that was in the shadow of China's attempts to convince voters to pick one party over another, and sort of the threats of an imminent war if they had made the wrong decision. So I definitely think that the threat of foreign interference in democratic elections is real.

Sam Hawley: Okay, Yana, let's have a look elsewhere. Where should we be watching this year? What should we be looking out for? We mentioned Russia, of course, and we know that Vladimir Putin will win there. But where else should we be looking this year, with so many elections taking place?

Yana Gorokhovskaia: Oh, well, there's a lot of elections to be tracking. I mean, you know, India, the world's biggest democracy, most populous democracy, is heading to the polls. Modi is a very popular leader, but he's also overseen a concentration in the media that really advances his own rhetoric and his party. So that's one to watch. South Africa is heading to the polls 30 years after Nelson Mandela was elected. There's widespread unemployment, there's violence, there's growing dissatisfaction with the democratic government. And so that election is really one to watch. In Mexico, it's quite likely that there will be two women vying to be the first female president. Pakistan has an important election. Tunisia has an important election. In Tunisia, you know, as being one of the success cases of the Arab Spring, it's very quickly gone downhill in terms of the autocratization that's happening there. There's a pivotal election this year, might be an election in the UK. The European Parliament has an election across Europe, so a lot of stuff.

Sam Hawley: Yeah, it's incredible, isn't it? Something like four billion people will have the opportunity this year to vote. Of course, it's not compulsory in all countries. It's compulsory in Australia, but in places like the United States and the UK, it's not. But it sounds like given there are so many elections this year, that democracy is really thriving. Is it, in your view?

Yana Gorokhovskaia: Well, I think it's important to divide or separate out democracy and elections. I mean, elections are a hallmark of democracy. That's absolutely true. But they're kind of a necessary but not sufficient condition for democracy. So what you really need, you mentioned Russia. There are countries that have elections. They have multi-party regular elections, but those aren't free and fair elections. And so we need to think about all of the supporting rights around elections, whether that's freedom of assembly, the rule of law, freedom of the press. All of those things are needed to have truly free and fair elections. And those are the elections that support democracy.

Sam Hawley: Right. And what about countries that do have free and fair elections, where there's been a shift to the right? Like in Germany, for instance, which is going to the polls not this year, but next year. What does that say about democracy? Or is it that it is a strong democracy because people have the right to elect authoritarian or far-right leaders?

Yana Gorokhovskaia: Well, I think people have the right to choose the policies that they prefer. What I think really matters is that people are not locked into those policies, and when they are dissatisfied, they can vote a government out. So if you think about a place like Poland that just had an election this previous year, you had a government that was working to strip away a lot of the democratic institutions and safeguards, and they even rolled out this referendum that had very controversial kind of questions on it, and they got a huge amount of pushback.

News report: Let's move now to Poland, where the Nationalist Party appears to be on the brink of losing power, with the majority of votes counted from the weekend's election.

News report: It was a very strong turnout. I think there was a signal from the electorate that was sent with around 74 percent going out to vote, which smashed previous records. So it really was a kind of plebiscite about this government.

Yana Gorokhovskaia: And that's democracy at work, right? People were able to vote that government out. They were able to vote against those policies. And so it's not so much the problem that those policies are being proposed. It's the freedom to choose or not to choose those policies, and also to vote a government out. I think in the long term, one thing that Freedom House is concerned about is leaders coming in through democratic institutions, but then working from the inside to dismantle those democratic institutions. And we saw that in places like Brazil. We're seeing it right now in El Salvador. That's a really big threat to democracy from the inside.

Sam Hawley: Yeah, right. So what's your verdict then, Yana? Is democracy thriving or is it declining? Or can we have both?

Yana Gorokhovskaia: Well, I'm an optimist. I think that, you know, if you look kind of, we just had our 50th anniversary for freedom in the world. We started this work back in 1973. And what you see actually is that democracy really endures. So those countries that have been rated free, a lot of them have been rated free for the whole time. They've never left that status. You see a lot more variation in partly free and not free countries, and so a lot of movement in those countries. So I have a lot of confidence in democracy. And kind of even looking at it from the other end, you know, in the most repressive countries in the world, there are people fighting for freedom and for democracy. And they haven't given up, and they are still advocating for those rights and freedoms. And so that kind of together makes me an optimist.

Sam Hawley: And how do we then deal with the threats that we face to democracy, for instance, the capital riots in the United States? How do we overcome those sort of threats?

Yana Gorokhovskaia: Well, I think there's a couple of things that we can do. So I think at home committing to free and fair elections and really thinking about the information environment and making sure that people get, you know, credible information and understand their rights and freedoms is really important. And then banding together with like-minded countries and governments is also really important and having that kind of community of democratic states. And as part of that, we also need to be calling out undemocratic behaviour. You know, when another kind of big trend that's been happening is these coups in Africa, and we really need to name coups for what they are. We need to talk about undemocratic behaviour. So I think, you know, building democracy at home, building partnerships around democratic principles and calling out undemocratic behaviour are really some of the pathways to make sure that we preserve democracy in this year of elections.

Sam Hawley: Yana Gorokhovskaia is a research director at Freedom House, a US-based organisation tracking freedom and democracy around the world. This episode was produced by Bridget Fitzgerald. Audio production by Sam Dunn. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sam Hawley. Thanks for listening.