The term “illiberal democracy” was, I think, introduced by
Fareed Zakaria. It was used as a badge of honor by Viktor Orban, the Hungarian Prime
Minister, the erstwhile poster-child of youthful East European reformers and
liberals of the 1990s who then decided to turn over the new leaf. More recently,
the term has gained further popularity as a way of naming and explaining the
regimes such as Erdoğan’s in Turkey or Putin’s in Russia. Perhaps Venezuela can
be placed in the same category too.
The implication of “illiberal democracy” is that the system
is democratic in the sense that there are free elections, more or less free, or
at least diverse, media, freedom of assembly etc., but that the “values” espoused
by the regime are illiberal. Erdoğan believes in primacy of Islam over the Enlightenment-defined
human rights, Orban believes in “Christian civilization”, Putin in “Russian spirituality”,
Maduro in “Bolivarian revolution”. “Illiberal” also implies that the system is
majoritarian in the sense that certain “inalienable” rights can be taken away
through simple vote. At the extreme, a majority can decide to deny certain
rights (say, to free speech) to a minority.
This definition, in my opinion, overstates the value component of these regimes. The
core, or the desired objective, of this new breed of quasi democratic regimes
is multi-partyism in which, however, only one party can win. Russia has gone the
furthest on the road of “electoral engineering” where there is seemingly a democracy,
multiple parties etc., but the rule of the game is that only one party can win,
and that the others, in function of their “pliability” and closeness to the “party
of power”, are allowed to participate in
the division of the spoils.
For it is precisely the “division of the spoils” which is a crucial
feature of the regimes. They do not share, as some commentators believe, “values”
antithetical to Western liberal values. Rather, I believe, these different values
are simply invented to provide voters with a feeling that they are indeed
voting for some distinct “national”, “homey”, “non-cosmopolitan” program while
the real objective of the party of power is to control the state in order to
steal, either directly (from overcharged public works or state-owned enterprises)
or indirectly (through private sector corruption and laws and regulations that
are for sale).
Thus, the party of power is simply an organized thievery that,
in order to survive and prosper, needs to pretend to defend certain “values”
and, most importantly, to keep on providing financial benefits to its supporters.
The system is thus fully clientelistic. It functions very similarly to Mobutu’s
Zaire (as beautifully described in Michala’s Wrong’s “In
the footsteps of Mr. Kurtz”). The top guys (Erdogan and his son, Putin, Rothenberg
and other oligarchs etc.) do, like Mobutu, take the largest slice of the pie,
but they are more than anything else, arbiters in the process of the division
of money between various factions. When you read Wrong’s book on Zaire, you
realize that Mobutu was at the apex of the pyramid, but that he was not an
unchecked dictator. To remain in power, he had to maintain support from various
groups that were vying for money. This is precisely how Putin maintains his
power: not as a Stalinesque dictator, but as an indispensable umpire whose sudden
departure would throw the system totally off-balance until, possibly after a
civil war, a new, generally accepted arbiter emerges.
I realized that it is this particular nature of the rule
combined with clientelism, which is crucial and not some opposition to “liberal”
values, when I spent this Summer in Serbia and Montenegro. Montenegro had been
ruled by one man, Djukanoviċ, for thirty years. He has in the meantime changed,
like Putin, various positions from which he ruled: president of his party,
prime minister, president of the country. Moreover, Djukanoviċ’s rule is broadly
consonant with Western liberal “values” in the areas of gay rights, environment,
lack of regulation and the like. He has brought
Montenegro to the threshold of the European Union and included it into NATO. But the structure of his rule is equivalent to
that of Putin: control of the government in order to steal, and distribution of
these gains to his supporters (and of course to himself and his clique).
In order for such a system to survive it needs to continue
winning elections, ideally forever. Ben Ali and Mubarak who headed similar
systems in Tunisia and Egypt eventually failed. But Djukanoviċ, Lukashenko, Erdoğan, Putin and Orban have not failed so far. Again Russia is at the forefront here.
To win elections, all means are used: state sector employees are strongly “recommended”
to vote for the “right” candidate or the “right” party, people are given cell
phones with which they record their vote and, if they vote “right” are allowed
to keep them (Montenegro used this technique for more than a decade), votes are
directly bought, or false ballots are added to sow confusion. The outright
stealing of the votes, by falsifying the totals, remains as the ultima ratio. In
Russia, such falsification is difficult or impossible in big cities but quite feasible
in small towns or faraway areas where the percentage of the vote for the “right”
candidate reaches 90 percent or more.
I think that it would be wrong, though, to regard such
regimes as a different species from the Western liberal regimes. They simply
exaggerate some features that exist in “advanced” democracies: sale of
regulations and laws is done in both but it is done more openly and blatantly
in the “new” regimes; creation of a real second party in Russia is as difficult
as the creation of a third party in the United States; voter suppression is
just taken one step further. They amplify, sometimes in a grotesque way, the
negative sides of democracies and suppress, almost fully, their positive sides.
But the new regimes’ key characteristic is that they are
multi-party electoral kleptocracies where only one party can win.
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