ALMOST half the world will hold elections this year: more than 60 countries, plus the EU, with more voters taking part than at any time in history. And it’s terrifying the elites. ‘2024 is the Year of Elections, and that’s a threat to democracy,’ we’re told. A threat? Once it would have been a cause for celebration.
This isn’t just because only 43 countries from this total are expected to hold free and fair elections, and of those, 28 do not meet the essential conditions for a democratic vote. It’s also because a lot of ‘democracies’ are starting to look very undemocratic indeed, including here in the West. And the people are getting very fed up with it.
Take Rishi Sunak, who recently travelled to Kiev to unveil his unilaterally decided £2.5billion military aid package when his own defence forces are so dangerously underfunded. All to support democracy, he would have us believe. If only! The Ukraine government may be cracking down on corruption uncovered in its Defence Ministry, with violations reportedly costing more than a quarter of a billion dollars. How much more is not cracked down on? Ukraine is still ranked the second-most corrupt country in Europe after Russia. Meanwhile Zelensky’s own wealth remains a cause of speculation.
Now it seems that Ukraine-style ‘autocracy’ – banning the opposition, jailing critics, taking over the media – is spreading across the EU. The Polish PM Donald Tusk, former President of the EU Council and a ‘liberal committed to restoring the rule of law’, newly appointed following a hotly contested election, has shown outright hostility towards the previous governing party, the popular ‘far right’ Law and Justice party (PiS). Two former PiS ministers have been arrested. Tusk has taken over the media and even threatened to replace the Governor of the Central Bank. The EU says nothing.
It is threatened by popular upheavals in other member states. Across Europe, farmers and food producers are taking the lead in opposing the Green Agenda, following the mass tractor protests in the Netherlands when the Dutch were faced with attempts by Brussels to shut down thousands of farms. This, and the ‘shock’ election of Geert Wilders, the ‘extreme right’ bogeyman of European politics, helped form the populist Farmer- Citizen Movement, now the largest party in the senate and regional government.
French farmers are also on the move, rising against globalist Emmanuel Macron, dumping manure and setting hay on fire in Avignon and Toulouse. They are now laying siege to Paris.
Germany has just witnessed unprecedented farmer uprisings and tractor protests which have swept the country and, with the GDL train drivers’ union joining in, have brought the country to a virtual standstill. Yet rather than seek political solutions, the ruling coalition is becoming increasingly punitive and uncompromising. And no wonder, with the populist AfD party gaining strongly throughout the country. Now the coalition are ‘floating the idea’ of banning the AfD altogether. Last week, the Saxony state branch was classified as a threat to democracy, a first step to declaring it unconstitutional.
Meanwhile it is no wonder that the voter preference of European citizens, suffering soaring inflation brought on by the Green Agenda, as well as their governments’ warmongering obsession, is inevitably moving to the right. Could we see PM Sunak banning ReformUK if Nigel Farage made a comeback to shape its immigration and climate policies? Impossible? Or not?
The current panic among Democrats in the US puts Europe in the shade. The mere thought of Donald Trump returning to the White House has driven Trump Derangement Syndrome to a whole new level, embracing the paradoxical ideology that ‘we have to destroy democracy to save it’, hence ‘it’s not anti-democratic to bar him from office; it’s needed to protect democracy’ as Kathy reported here. As well as hearing a perpetual witch hunt of legal challenges, courts are being petitioned to take Trump’s name off presidential ballot papers altogether. This has removed the rights of some 7million Americans to exercise their democratic vote. Ironically, the more President Biden smears Trump supporters as ‘ultra-Maga’ extremists and ‘semi-fascists’ who would destroy democracy, the more Trump’s popularity soars beyond Biden’s own.
The 65 Project, an association of lawyers in the US who aim ‘to deter right-wing talent from signing on to any future GOP efforts’, is specifically targeting lawyers who litigated 2020 election irregularities or represented Trump. It’s little short of Stalinist. Lawfare, the pursuit of political opponents through the legal system, is not worthy of Western democracies.
And it’s starting to backfire. Voters in the West can see through the shenanigans of increasingly authoritarian governments. What they want is genuinely democratic representation that deals with the issues affecting them, and works towards securing domestic prosperity and peaceful coexistence abroad. Instead, they are being delivered ‘green’ catalysed economic impoverishment, social unrest, unrestricted immigration – legal and illegal – and endless wars. No wonder they’re sick of it.
It’s time voters said no. They have had enough of being exploited by greedy, contemptuous, political careerists. If blockading roads and dumping manure is what it takes to save democracy from tyranny then bring it on.