DAVID LEWIS: Ironic points of light dot our dark horizon

This year will be characterised by a veritable orgy of democracy in action. National elections are scheduled in 74 countries across the globe, including major population centres and key players in international affairs such as the US, India, Indonesia, the UK, the EU and SA.

Is it not then ironic that common to so many of the countries participating in elections — the most important marker of democratic governance — is that the central issue at stake is the future of democracy itself? In recent memory democracy has been threatened by civil wars and military coups. While these remain a threat in some young and unstable democracies — witness West Africa — today the principal threat to democracy, particularly in well-established democracies, is the outcome of democratic elections themselves.

This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. We’ve seen before how elected leaders such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orban and Narendra Modi and their respective political parties have undermined democracy in the US, Hungary and India. Trump and Modi and their parties will once again be candidates for election in their important and populous countries. While Orban and his Fidesz party will not have to contest national elections in 2024, they will undoubtedly seek to influence the outcome of European parliamentary elections as widely as possible.

Take the US. We’ve seen how Trump, with congressional Republican Party complicity, has rigged the supreme court, threatened the vaunted independence of the US prosecutorial service, vilified the media, threatened his opponents, lied to the public, undermined the voting rights of oppositional groups and sought to reverse the outcome of elections he lost.

That electoral defeat has left him with much unfinished business. As his party’s near certain candidate he has loudly expressed his support for dictatorial powers, and promised to mount congressional and criminal investigations into his opponents and purge the civil service of any officials opposed to him.

In India, Modi’s principal objective has been to replace its secular state — the critical cornerstone of Indian democracy — with a Hindu state in which the 200-million strong Muslim minority is reduced to second-class citizenship, an objective for the realisation of which he appears willing to risk, even invite, the possibility of civil war in the world’s largest democracy.

When Orban lost power in an electoral defeat in Hungary in 2002 and was defeated again in 2006, the lesson he learnt is that when next in power he would create a “central political force field” that would govern for at least 20 years. After his return to power in the 2010 elections he has gone about securing this objective by shamelessly rigging elections and destroying any semblance of independent media and civil society. Since 2010 he has won four successive elections with increasingly large majorities.

Clearly elections alone do not guarantee democracy, particularly in the face of governing leaders and parties that are determined to hollow out the formal democratic institutions and processes, including the electoral process itself.

Sadly, democracy has not been challenged only by its anti-democratic opponents. It has also been undermined by its own poor outcomes. In particular, democracy has not staunched growing wealth and income inequality, nor has it achieved political and civic equality. Quite the contrary. Money dominates politics in a variety of well- known ways from political party funding to lobbying power. 

It is no accident that Trump and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak are among the wealthiest people in the US and UK respectively. While these plutocrats are the faces of democracy, the everyday business of promoting their interests is delegated to global consulting firms whose technocratic staff speak a language designed to marginalise less slick public servants, elected representatives and the public.

In 1947 Sir Winston Churchill famously said that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others forms that have been tried from time to time”. That may have been self-evidently true in the aftermath of the defeat of Adolf Hitler, and it may have remained so during the baby boom decades and the decolonisation after the war. But no longer. It is for those of us committed to political governance by and for the people to identify the structures and practices that will best realise the noble ideals of democratic governance.

At the start of  World War 2 WH Auden wrote a poem entitled 1st September 1939. In this great piece of work the poet surveyed the state of the world at this dangerous and terrifying juncture. He wrote: “As the clever hopes expire/Of a low dishonest decade:/Waves of anger and fear/Circulate over the bright/And darkened lands of the earth,/Obsessing our private lives;/The unmentionable odour of death/Offends the September night.”

How familiar is this to all of us in a world dominated by major wars in Europe and the Middle East, in which hundreds of thousands of lives are lost, millions are displaced from their homes and a third world war is clearly discernible on the horizon; where every country is stalked by obscene wealth amid grinding poverty; where new forms of media further divide us; where elected dictators thrive and democracy withers.

Auden’s world of 1939 is our world nearly a century later. And yet in the final stanza of his long lament, Auden sees “dotted everywhere/Ironic points of light”. Are any “points of light” discernible in our world? Some, certainly.

The Brazilian and Polish electorates turning back the tide of right-wing resurgence in South America and Europe; the casting out of the appalling Boris Johnson and the prospect of the end of Conservative Party rule in Britain; the distinct possibility that the coming US election may see the last of Trump; the prospect that Ukraine may yet see off Russian imperialism; the belated recognition by small sections of the elite that present levels of inequality are incompatible with political stability and continued economic growth; the willingness of a major country to take action in the realm of foreign policy that is not dictated by its narrow, immediate self-interest but rather by the greater global good.

The last point of light refers, of course, to SA’s decision to refer Israel’s genocidal conduct in the Middle East to the International Court of Justice and the resounding victory it has won there. Some have dismissed this as meaningless, even inimical to the legitimacy of the court and international law, on the basis that it cannot be enforced. This misses the point. Of course there’s no international police force to enforce the court’s judgment. But the judgment has enormous moral authority.

This is a court whose jurisdiction has been voluntarily consented to by both contending parties, pronouncing upon a convention to which both parties are signatories. The majority for the SA case was overwhelming. Even the ad hoc Israeli judge, the venerable Aharon Barak, found that the words of senior Israeli politicians and military leaders have the potential to incite genocide and that Israel’s response to Hamas terrorism has created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. 

The ball is now in the court of Israel and its allies in the governments of the US, UK, Germany and other Western powers. Do they accept the moral authority of the court, or do they make common cause with the Myanmar junta and the Russian dictator who have also attempted to delegitimise the rule of law by ignoring its judgments? 

By its actions on this occasion the SA government has brought peace in the Middle East a fraction closer and made me proud to be an SA citizen.

• Lewis, a former trade unionist, academic, policymaker, regulator and company board member, was a cofounder and director of Corruption Watch.