The next 18 months bring three major international elections at which the survival of democracy in the countries in question will be at stake. In Hungary next April or May Prime Minister Viktor Orbán will face a united opposition coalition at the polls. Next October Brazil will hold an election pitting the hard-right President Jair Bolsonaro against the leftish, resurgent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Then in Turkey, in the first half of 2023, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan should face his most formidable electoral trial yet. Three iconic international authoritarians; three serious challenges to their rule; three potentially era-defining tests of democracy.
In Hungary, Brazil and Turkey voters are tiring of corruption and misgovernment. The Covid pandemic has undermined those authoritarians whose swaggering nationalism has proven a poor substitute for competence. In all three countries the opposition is newly invigorated and confident, and there is a thrilling possibility of a change of leadership. All three are multi-party democracies unlike, say, Vladimir Putin’s Russia (let alone Xi Jinping’s China). Yet in all three, the democratic playing field has become ever-more tilted towards the incumbent and his party. Orbán, Bolsonaro and Erdoğan have systematically attacked their countries’ democratic institutions. It is far from certain that legitimate votes against any of them would actually translate into peaceful and just transitions of power.
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