How to beat populist elected dictators

Practical campaign strategy — a series

Saturday April 6th, Slovakia. Another one of those elections where democracy was on the line and democracy lost.  We’ve had quite a few of those in the last decade: sometimes the democrats win, and sometimes they lose.  In Turkey, just the week before, Erdogan’s AK Party was beaten - not only in two horse races in Istanbul and Ankara, but they even came second in the multiparty vote share for the first time since the 1990s.

The enemy goes by a number of names: illiberal democrats, authoritarian demagogues, hybrid regimes, I’m going to call them elected dictators, and I’ve chosen that name deliberately. We’ll see why in a minute.

They’ve emerged everywhere: in new post-communist countries, and the oldest democracy of them all: the United States; in the Philippines and Brazil; they threatened one of the oldest parliamentary systems, in the UK, and menaced what could be the most robust constitutions, in Italy.

When we think of a dictator we imagine someone like Saddam Hussein, Ceaucescu or maybe even Mobutu Sese Seko. He’s a man in a military uniform, who took power by force. But there’s another type, one who doesn’t seize power, but slides his way into it. Doesn’t demolish the institutions, but hollows them out.  Julius Caesar perhaps — but certainly Mussolini or Milosevic. And these all started as ordinary political figures. Even in Yugoslavia, which wasn’t a democracy, Milosevic still had to maneouvre around institutions before he could actually take control.

It’s normal for a dictator to be elected, at least the first time.

What’s new about the current crop not that they take power without violence, but that they’ve learned to stay in office without using much.  They control the economy, hand out contracts to friends, and deny them to enemies. These enriched friends buy up independent media, which then toes the government line. Judges, are subject to disciplinary regimes to ensure reliability (or if that fails, labeled “enemies of the people”). Civil society groups with funding from abroad are denounced as “foreign agents” while the regimes themselves grow fat on EU funds or FDI from Russia and China. The normal rules of the democratic game where the “government of the day” is in charge of the state, not synonymous with it, are replaced what former Hungarian Supreme Court Judge András Sájo calls “ruling by cheating”, and I have called “political monopoly.”

Yet we now know enough about this kind of regime to understand how it works, what it wants to achieve — and how it can be beaten, even at the ballot box, in an unfair playing field.  This fifteen part series will mine our experience of fighting populist elected dictators to discover what doesn’t work, and what does.

So why elected dictators? Because politics is a game of persuasion not dispassionate neutral observation. When Orbán calls himself an illiberal democrat, he wants to claim a democratic legitimacy he doesn’t deserve. It’s fine for political scientists to use terms like “hybrid regimes”, they need to be neutral, at least in their academic role, but we’re not, and using language that describes what we’re really up against is the first step to victory.

This series, published every few days over the next month, will be divided into three sections.

Part 1  - 3 briefings that will look at the overall situation we’re in, and what we need to do to keep democracy safe.

Part 2 - at least 4 briefings that will cover mistakes to avoid

Part 3 - at least 5 briefings that will focus on what democrats need to do to win