The democracy that must be taken care of

Last week, the Amafore 2022 Meeting was attended by different speakers and high-level conferences, including the journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, Anne Applebaum. She opened the conference with something that until now had only been mentioned on issues of economic relevance: “While we are here, the Ukraine is being invaded. In occupied territory, people are being rounded up, sent to concentration camps, beaten and in some cases deported to Russia. When the Ukrainians liberate the territory occupied by Russia, they will find in their towns mass graves and torture chambers.” It seems that we already forgot about Ukraine, that we took up the subject again when a missile fell on NATO territory and threatened to be the button that would start a war like no other. We breathed when they assured that it was not Russian but from the defense of Ukraine and we returned to our lives. I take up fragments of what he presented because it seems to me that it hides lessons that we must remember.

Then he talked about Iran, where I just received a video, thanks to its brave women abroad who have done everything possible to keep the issue alive, in which he hears a crying child and a woman begging the police not to do nothing to his son. We have forgotten the brutality of the authorities, the people killed and even the story of the death of the woman who started it all.

“Different regimes, same tactics,” Applebaum said. When someone fights against an autocrat, they are not only fighting against him, he explained, but also against all the tools that another of his class has in any other country in the world: China, Iran or Russia, because his assets can be shared. Today it is not only about a subject controlling the country but about complex structures, security services (which can also train the security services of another country), surveillance, and professional propagandists. “Companies controlled by a corrupt state do business with companies controlled in another corrupt state.” And there is another point that seems vital to me, that in recent years we have been able to see, but not so clearly name, the blurred line of ideologies: autocrats that fit within the entire political spectrum. “They are not united by ideals, they are united by agreements.”

He mentioned that one of the problems is that we believed that once democracy was established, we didn’t have to do anything to maintain it. They asked him, what were the signs of a democracy at risk? He replied: “when they try to modify the mechanisms that originally brought them to power, to prevent others from doing so. It’s not just the electoral bodies, but all the institutions that allow democracy.”

I published a fragment of that meeting on Twitter, and since the issue of Electoral Reform is a sensitive matter, hordes of trolls -who do not follow me- fell to insult and disqualify in the purest style of “where have you been for the last 90 years” (ha!). Curious, Anne was talking about Putin, and Maduro, Iran and China, right?