At its most basic, democracy denotes rule by the people. The word is derived from the Greek demos, meaning people, and kratos, meaning rule. The practice of democracy traces its 2500-year-old history back to the political system of the ancient Greek city-states, notably Athens, and the various forms of collective decision-making that had followed in other parts of the world, including Africa.   

Democracy is still understood as the rule of the people with elections as its central canon, but the wider conversation is now focused primarily on the democracy-autocracy dichotomy and on what has become known around the world as “democratic backsliding”.     

The shifting sands of geopolitics have been settling down in a zig-zag manner dividing the world into democracies and autocracies in ways vastly different from the straightforward division of the Cold War era. Then it was all about democracy under the leadership of the United States, facing off communism under the aegis of the Soviet Union. And it was about a clash of the conflicting ideologies of capitalism and state-controlled economy. 

Today’s bipolarity has a much more complex character. Protagonists of the autocracy network, notably Russia, China, Iran and their proxies, still have one common denominator: a disdain for democracy, which they try to disparage and undermine in a number of ways.   

Democracies, on the other hand, neither present a united front nor articulate a clear shared vision. They are also internally weakened. Many — including the United States, the formerly preeminent model of democracy — are rent apart by polarisation and are threatened by the antidemocratic character of right-wing populism. The real or imagined fears of “the other” giving substance to divisive xenophobic narratives underlying populism have been with us forever; we are all tribal, after all. But what is new is that populist movements have now moved from the shadowy fringes to mainstream and exert ever growing political influence contributing to autocratisation.  

The combined effect of the various factors on global democratic backsliding is well documented by data. The 2024 Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Report shows that in 2003, 11 countries were autocratising; this figure jumped to 42 in 2023. And whereas in 2003 about 50% of the world’s population lived in autocracies, in 2023 the percentage of people living under autocratic rule rose to 71%.

But, while external political influences and disruptive new technologies certainly play a role, backsliding is best understood through a primary focus on the domestic political actors both at the elite and citizens levels. 

Democracy is an answer to the question of who rules and requires that the people be sovereign and able to choose their representatives in free and fair elections. In and by itself, this is not enough for the proper functioning of democracy. The missing element is liberalism, a word derived from Latin meaning free and referring to the limits of power incumbent upon those elected to office. These limits are designed to protect the rights and freedoms of the individual and oblige those in power to uphold the constitution and the rule of law. The door to autocracy often opens when these limits are ignored or eliminated by the elected representatives.   

The inevitable bottom-up reaction comes from citizens once they start to perceive their democracy for the sham it has become. They get fed up with leaders who are not only unaccountable but who are often also corrupt and unable to provide jobs, assure personal security and offer a better quality of life for their people. Studies show that for most citizens, regardless of where on the planet they might reside, effective governance is more important than political participation rights. If democracy does not deliver the goods, a change of regime might appear to desperate people to be the only way in which to seek a better quality of daily life. 

This has been amply demonstrated in Africa. In just four years, from 2020-23, seven countries had experienced regime change through military coups. And while the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States have condemned the coups, citizens in some of those countries cheered openly in the streets. 

The concern is that military takeovers are part of a much broader political crisis of democracy on the continent as popular antidemocratic sentiments run beyond the coup belt. According to Afrobarometer data, the proportion of citizens rating their country as a democracy has dropped by three percentage points across 32 countries from 2014 to 2023. 

Against this background, South Africa is one of a handful of countries that stand out as a beacon of hope on the continent. South Africans have also become deeply disappointed and disgruntled over state corruption with its associated service delivery failures across all the sectors and amidst unacceptably high levels of unemployment and crime. And yet, instead of resorting to arms to vent their anger, they went to the poles and were heard. 

The resultant government of national unity (GNU) was formed against all odds in record time, especially in comparison with the marathon wait of several weeks or even months it takes some of the leading western democracies to reach agreements on coalition governments. 

The GNU is still under probation, but the mood of the country has been perceptively lifted in the expectation of a better future for all. Let’s celebrate that promise.  

Professor Ursula van Beek is the director of the Centre for Research on Democracy at Stellenbosch University.

This raises the question of how democracy is understood and implemented in our own regional context. 

The one commonality on which there is a general agreement is that democracy is a political system in which people select their own rulers. Beyond that, the concept is highly contested in every part of the world. One reason behind the contestation is precisely because democracy is understood and applied differently in diverse political, social, and cultural contexts of individual countries. In addition, democracy plays itself out in the field of politics where competing forces of society collide with consequences felt by all.

In Africa the discussion centres on two main questions: is democracy a colonial imposition and is a system that emphasises the individual suitable for the African communal identity?     

The word “democracy” is indeed an import, having originated in ancient Greece. But   democratic procedures as a form of social interaction were in existence among Africans in pre-colonial times in the form of village assemblies debating and taking joint decisions pertaining to the affairs of the respective village community. And as one of Africa’s great political philosophers, Claude Ake, reminds us, traditional African systems are infused with communal consciousness, a stress on participation and, significantly, the accountability of chiefs at a risk of their displacement from power. 

Given this communal participatory character it might be argued that a deliberative type of democracy would be more suited to Africa than one based on multiparty competition. And yet, Afrobarometer’s findings make it quite clear that while most African societies do place much value on consensual democracy, there is also widespread commitment to representative government, albeit one that places limits on the extent of multiparty political competition.  

So, contrary to some sceptical assumptions of its supposedly alien character, democracy as a political system of rule was readily adopted by African countries across the continent in the wake of decolonisation and then again following the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and throughout the Soviet bloc. 

The collapse of communism has undoubtedly contributed to the ending of apartheid, which during the years of the Cold War was upheld on the grounds of guarding against the “Red Threat”. Some commentators assume the so-called threat was merely a fabrication by the apartheid regime to justify its clinging on to white racial domination. But declassified CIA documents leave little room for doubt the threat was real. Soviet military presence and interventions in the civil wars in Angola and Mozambique, aimed at consolidating left-wing regimes in the two countries, as well as installing in power the South-West African People’s Organisation in Namibia had as its ultimate objective bringing down the white minority regime in South Africa. 

In the event, democracy arrived in South Africa and was seen around the world as a beacon of hope for humanity at large: if the deeply divided South Africa could do it, then so could any other country in the world.

Sadly, the euphoria of the early days is no more. 

This is because once democracy has been achieved, citizens expect their hard-won victory to bear fruit translating into a better quality of life. And in a democracy, they have a right to anticipate that their basic needs and demands will be implemented by the government they have elected in free elections. 

When instead citizens encounter rising inequality, grinding poverty, unacceptable levels of unemployment, load-shedding, collapsing infrastructure and having to live with rampant crime and gender-based violence, trust in the rulers is likely to be gone. And without trust in leaders, the very foundations of democracy begin to crumble. This happens when politicians use power more for their own benefit than that of those they are supposed to represent and serve. At that point — even if basic constitutionalised democratic institutions are still in place, as is largely the case in South Africa — the performance of the government matters more. 

There are no easy fixes, and no amount of more empty promises can turn the situation around. The only remedy is a comprehensive restructuring of the economy focused on economic growth and job creation on a huge scale. Fixing the economy and building up infrastructure needs to be accompanied by beefing up security and the criminal justice system to uphold law and order, so that citizens can feel safe again. 

This, in turn, needs committed leaders. The glory of democracy is that citizens get to elect such leaders into power through the ballot box. To choose well, it takes responsible democratic citizens who know their rights, who listen carefully to debates, who get involved in civil society organisations and who can thus develop the courage of their convictions. 

In this process we all would do well to remind ourselves of the words spoken by St Augustine more than 1 500 years ago: “In the house of the just those who command are at the service of those who seem the commanded. Indeed, it is not out of passion for domination that they command, but out of desire to give oneself; not out of pride in being leaders, but out of concern to provide for everyone”. 

Professor Ursula van Beek is the director of the Centre for Research on Democracy at Stellenbosch University.

Alas, today the mood is increasingly one of pessimism or even alarm and the safe path into the future we had imagined, is no more. It seems that democracy itself is under pressure.

What do we know now that we didn’t foresee then?  

We did not predict the speed and the wide-ranging implications of the information technology revolution. We did not anticipate how much migrations would increase in the new century. We did not fully understand the extent and impact of the fast-growing economic inequalities in the world. 

We failed to prophesy a shift in the balance of power between “the West” and “the rest”, and we did not even begin to imagine the existential threat posed by climate change that our planet is now facing. We also did not think then that multilateralism would be faced with the danger of rising populism and nationalism around the globe. 

It is populism, in particular, that has many people around the world worried about the road ahead as the phenomenon is gaining traction in both old and young democracies. 

What is populism?

Most commonly, populism is understood as the relationship between the small and powerful assemblage of people called the “elite” and the large group called the “people”. Populists unwittingly endorse this view when they present themselves as the defenders of a certain section of the population, or the “people” as a whole, against what they portray as the corrupt elite that is bent on depriving the “people” of their rights and their voice.  

But that definition is too narrow to truly capture the multifaceted nature of populism. To understand it more fully, values must be considered, especially those on which identity is built. 

Scores of white Americans, for example, feel that liberal politicians have relegated them to the status of a discriminated-against minority in their “own” country. In reaction, many have retreated into a kind of political tribalism, becoming hostile to both “the other” in the country — however defined — and to immigrants. One cannot but reflect poignantly on how this is happening in the very same country that had once welcomed the tired and poor “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” who then went on to help make America great.  

Values-based identity markers know no cultural boundaries. Take Poland and Turkey, for instance. Historical, cultural, economic and political differences between the two countries could not be greater. And yet both have moved furthest away from the model democracies they were in their respective regions at the height of post-Cold War global democratisation.  

In both cases the marker of identity for the majority of the respective populations has been religion: Christianity and Islam, respectively.  It is hard to escape the conclusion that in highly religious societies the more permissive liberal values elevate the status and influence of religion rather than seeing religion diminished or retreating from political life.  

The roots 

A major normative split occurred during the so-called cultural revolution of the 1960s, which originated in the US and spread to the rest of the Western world with far-reaching consequences, a few of which are worth mentioning. 

First, the cultural revolution confronted traditional survival-focused values with orientations advocating individual rights, self-expression and gender equality. This was seen as an assault on the old familiar values by the older and less secure strata of the population and has led to a generational rift.  

Second, the shift away from traditional values produced a mode of identity formation in which frugality was replaced by consumption-based forms of self-realisation. The consumer market has become an arena of identity construction while consumption-based lifestyles emerged as a mode of self-articulation. 

But as economic growth rates started to move downwards, consumption-based self-realisation can be increasingly sustained only by some, giving rise to exclusion and inequality expanding further the gap between the “people” and the elite.   

Third, the cultural revolution rearranged the traditional role of the left, the historical promoter of the working class that encouraged redistributive policies to create social safety nets. The “new” left, in contrast, targeted the middle classes and came out strongly in favour of political and cultural changes. This policy repelled the old left’s traditional working-class constituency, producing yet another split and thus more feeding ground for populism to grow. 

The various values-based divisions in combination with steeply increasing economic inequalities have the power to fracture a sense of collective identity that is necessary to uphold democracy. This kind of identity, known as patriotism, is cultivated by developing attachments to the norms and values of a liberal constitution. Without it, the idea of democracy in multicultural and/or historically conflicted countries such as, for example, South Africa is simply unimaginable. 

Populism works in the opposite direction. It replaces the notion of inclusive political belonging with pre-political ideas of group membership defined by shared language, rituals, culture, history or religion. As a result, not patriotism but multitudes of nationalisms are emerging, causing deep polarisation within and between nations around the world. According to the latest V-Dem Democracy Report, polarisation along with heightened misinformation constitutes the most dangerous threat to liberal democracy. 

There are no easy fixes when it comes to stemming the rising tide of populism. But that does not mean we should be hoisting the white flag. As in the case of climate change, only a concerted effort by both enlightened elites and dedicated ordinary citizens willing to work together can start to reverse the hazardous trajectory on which humanity finds itself at present. It is up to us to keep democracy strong, vibrant and resilient.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.