[The most dramatic decline in the
Freedom House rankings belonged to the Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan,
where an electoral fiasco in October led to mass protests,
the annulment of parliament and the de facto takeover of the country by
populist nationalist Sadyr Japarov, who is now steering the former Soviet republic in the authoritarian
direction of its neighbors. Freedom House judged Kyrgyzstan to be “Not
Free.”]
Freedom House grades individual
countries on 25 indicators that evaluate the health of a given nation’s
democracy (or lack thereof). The cumulative score then enables the
organization, which has been in operation since 1941, to rank a given country
as “Free,” “Partly Free,” or “Not Free” (see map below). Of the 195 independent
countries evaluated, 73 saw aggregate score declines and only 28 saw
growth.
That margin is the widest of its
kind in the past decade and a half. Moreover, 54 countries are now labeled “Not
Free,” or about 38 percent of the world’s population, the highest share since
2005. Less than 20 percent of the world’s population lives in countries now
classified as “Free.”
The most dramatic decline in the
Freedom House rankings belonged to the Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan,
where an electoral fiasco in October led to mass protests,
the annulment of parliament and the de facto takeover of the country by
populist nationalist Sadyr Japarov, who is now steering the former Soviet republic in the authoritarian
direction of its neighbors. Freedom House judged Kyrgyzstan to be “Not
Free.”
As in previous years, major
pro-democracy protests rocked various parts of the world. But from Algeria to Belarus to Hong Kong, “regimes that protests had taken by surprise …
regained their footing, arresting and prosecuting demonstrators, passing newly
restrictive laws, and in some cases resorting to brutal crackdowns, for which
they faced few international repercussions,” noted Freedom House. Of 39 countries and territories that
experienced pro-democracy protests in 2019, 23 saw their scores in decline the
following year.
Perhaps the most eye-catching
decision was Freedom House’s downgrading of India — the
world’s largest democracy — from “Free” to “Partly Free.” The report
highlighted the steady erosion of Indian democracy under the watch of Prime
Minister Narendra Modi, whose role the organization associates with increasing
pressure on human rights groups, intimidation and harassment of journalists and
academics, policies that stigmatized and harmed religious minorities,
particularly Muslims, and the politicization of the Indian judiciary.
“Under Modi, India appears to have
abandoned its potential to serve as a global democratic leader, elevating
narrow Hindu nationalist interests at the expense of its founding values of
inclusion and equal rights for all,” observed Freedom House.
The onset of the coronavirus pandemic also became a vehicle for
governments from Hungary to El Salvador to the Philippines to quash dissent,
ban demonstrations and undermine political transparency. “The impacts [of
measures there] will outlast the health crisis … and lead to limits on freedom
long into the future,” Sarah Repucci, one of the co-authors of the report, said
in a Tuesday briefing.
In this year’s report, titled
“Democracy Under Siege,” the organization called out the “malign influence of
the regime in China, the world’s most populous dictatorship,” pointing to not
only its repressive policies in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, but also the effect its
rising clout abroad is having in undermining human rights accountability in
international forums and strengthening alliances between autocratic
governments.
For years, Freedom House was seen
by some critics on
the left as a platform for Cold War moralizing, a cog in a
larger Washington apparatus aimed at justifying American hegemony. But Freedom
House also took issue with the United States.
Though still classified as “Free,”
the United States fell down the rankings by three points, finding a perch
closer to countries such as Romania and Panama than Western European partners
such as France and Germany. That’s a consequence of a decline that began before
the term of President Donald Trump but grew more discernible while he was office.
“The final weeks of the Trump
presidency featured unprecedented attacks on one of the world’s most visible
and influential democracies,” noted the report. “After four years of condoning
and indeed pardoning official malfeasance, ducking accountability for his own
transgressions, and encouraging racist and right-wing extremists, the outgoing
president openly strove to illegally overturn his loss at the polls,
culminating in his incitement of an armed mob to disrupt Congress’s
certification of the results. Trump’s actions went unchecked by most lawmakers
from his own party, with a stunning silence that undermined basic democratic
tenets.”
This atmosphere of crisis has
global implications. Though “the spread of authoritarianism is a phenomenon
that is proceeding quite nicely on its own,” Michael Abramowitz, president of
Freedom House, told Today’s WorldView, the “outsize role” of the United States
as one of the world’s oldest and most influential democracies still matters.
“After the events of the Capitol,
from a propaganda point of view, we handed a big victory to autocrats,” he
said.
To help address America’s
democratic backsliding, Freedom House’s Repucci noted the need for significant
political reforms that would expand voting rights, reckon with histories of racial
discrimination in U.S. elections and set up independent districting commissions
that would move the country away from the partisan gerrymandering that helps fuel polarization.
Democratic lawmakers are pushing legislation that would address some of these
concerns. But Republicans in state legislatures are also advancing dozens of bills that would restrict ease of
voting.
There is “very serious work to do
as a country,” Abramowitz said, reiterating his hope that Washington “heed the
warnings that are coming out of this report.”
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