The “Global State of Democracy” report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance says “democracy is at risk” around the world due to a pandemic that has exacerbated threats to freedom through the “imposition of states of emergency, the spread of disinformation, and crackdowns on independent media and freedom of expression.”
They called it “authoritarian tendencies.”
More than one-fourth of the world’s population now lives in a “democratic backsliding” country – which the report defines as the “sustained and deliberate process of subversion of basic democratic tenets” by government leaders. This in itself, the report says, is “threatening to become a different kind of pandemic.”
“The number of countries undergoing ‘democratic backsliding’ (a more severe and deliberate kind of democratic erosion) has never been as high as in the last decade, and includes regional geopolitical and economic powers such as Brazil, India and the United States”.
The report calls the United States “the bastion of global democracy” but says the U.S. “fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale.”
The report criticizes government curbs on freedom of movement and worship that were meant to be temporary but have remained, thus “limiting democratic freedoms for much longer than originally envisaged.”