
A latest report by an international think tank claims that half of the world’s democratic countries are currently experiencing “an erosion of democracy”. The report also claimed that the situation has worsen in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.
"We're seeing extraordinarily severe headwinds for democracy now, intensified by the political fallout from the economic crisis that started with the pandemic and the economic consequences of the war in Ukraine", International IDEA secretary-general Kevin Casas-Zamora told AFP.
"It might be that the credibility of elections is challenged. It might be that the rule of law is under assault. It might be that civic space is being constrained", he added in the report.
The report identified seven democracies where the erosion has been the most severe. Currently, the nations are El Salvador, Brazil, Hungary, India, United States, Mauritius and Poland.
The inclusion of the US in the list was regarded as a worrying trend by the think tank.
"I'm very concerned by what we're seeing in the United States", he said.
"It's quite clear by now that the fever didn't break with the election of a new administration," he said, pointing to "the runaway levels of polarisation (and) the attempts to undermine the credibility of electoral results without any evidence of fraud," he said according to Reuters.
Official data suggests that 104 out of the 173 countries covered by the report are democracies and around half of them are currently in decline. 27 nations are slowly moving towards authoritarianism.