YACOOB ABBA OMAR: French elections and the need to defend democracy among ourselves

Ideas have a way of moving from one place to another at a particular moment. Today we see toxic philosophies swirling around the world challenging democracy and tolerance, and even becoming mainstream.  

For example, the runner-up in the first round of the French presidential elections, Marine Le Pen, as well as the far-right political journalist Eric Zemmour, have expressed their high regard for Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “strong” leader who defends traditional values. Yet this strong leader has been responsible for not only suppressing his own people but trampling on the rights, lives and infrastructure of other nations.

What accounts for the increasingly brazen rise of populism, illiberalism and chauvinism, including in such long-standing democracies as the US and India? Treating this as a recent phenomenon displays amnesia. For example, neoliberal policies pushed especially from the 1980s and 1990s onwards, saw the market being worshipped and the state defined as antigrowth and anti-individual liberties.

The erosion of the welfare state and regulation accompanied the emerging “Washington Consensus”, which pushed cuts to social spending and state sectors in the developing world. These had been safeguards against market vagaries, and their removal has led to large increases in inequality over the past two generations.

The outsourcing of jobs and the destruction of working class communities in rich countries laid the foundation for the rise of populism in the 2010s. “These shifts then produced their own backlash, where the Left blamed growing inequality on capitalism itself, and the Right saw liberalism as an attack on all traditional values”, according to Francis Fukuyama, author of inter alia The End of History And The Last Man.

Apart from the economic policy sphere, other past practices have continued to define how the US and its allies are seen by other states. Iran has not forgotten that the first CIA-sponsored coup was against its democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953, followed by the installation of the brutal regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi. It was the US that sought to undermine the independence of Cuba when it imposed an embargo after the Batista dictatorship it favoured was overthrown by forces under Fidel Castro’s command in 1960.

Fyodor Lukyanov, influential chair of Russia’s Presidium of the Council on Foreign & Defence Policy, wrote that unipolarity after the collapse of the Soviet Union “gave the US the ability and possibility to do whatever it saw fit on the world stage”.

An important question that needs to be addressed by all of us, especially given the potential role SA can play, is what can be done to make the future of democracy safer? Fighting corruption everywhere is an essential part of it. Anne Applebaum, writing in The Atlantic, puts it this way: “We [referring to the US] need to enforce money-laundering laws, stop selling security and surveillance technology to autocracies, and divest from the most vicious regimes altogether”.

This applies just as well to SA — the departure of the Guptas does not mean they have not spawned dozens of Guptatjies. Externally, South Africans have to be guided by their principled commitment to the preservation and promotion of human rights. This means firmly condemning attacks on basic rights and sovereignty, be they committed by the US, Israel, Afghanistan, China or Russia.

SA must promote the peaceful resolution of conflicts everywhere. But the most important battle has to be waged within and among ourselves. We must recognise that many autocratic regimes, such as the Nazis and fascists, have arisen off the back of xenophobic attacks on people of other colours, religions, ethnicities or nationalities.

We must be vigilant against the temptation to suspend basic rights in the “public interest”, restricting freedoms just a little here and there for seemingly genuine reasons, since this can create the soil from which autocrats emerge.

Our critical public, watchful media and independent judiciary must be the custodians of our democracy. We must be inspired by the understanding that defence of the liberalism in our constitution is a truly radical project that all progressive forces should sign up for.

• Abba Omar is director of operations at the Mapungubwe Institute.