ADDED 03/08/2018
FROM 03/08/2018 | Slate
BY YASCHA MOUNK
He is following the same playbook as other authoritarian populists around the world. He’s just bad at it—so far. A week after the horrific shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead and 14 injured, Donald Trump publicly scolded members of his own party: “They have great power over you […]
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FROM 03/08/2018 | Budapest Beacon
BY Staff
“If you don’t have a free and pluralistic press that is conveying messages on different sides of issues and which is actively critical of the government and its policies, then democracy starts to be meaningless. If people are just fed a steady diet of pro-government propaganda by media sources either controlled by the government or […]
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ADDED 03/08/2018
FROM | The Economist
BY Bagehot
British institutions may not withstand the authoritarian-populist wave. IN HIS dystopian novel of 1935, “It Can’t Happen Here”, Sinclair Lewis described the rise of an American Caesar, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip. Buzz easily defeats Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency by promising to make America great again. He then sets about destroying the country’s system of checks […]
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ADDED 03/08/2018
FROM 03/08/2018 | Open Democracy
BY Bilge Yabanci
Not a single International Women’s Day or Mother’s Day can pass by without reasserting women’s main duty as child-bearers and men’s responsibility to ‘protect’ and ‘rekindle’ fragile mothers. Last January, shortly after Turkey’s military operation started in Afrin, I was at a women’s event held by a pro-government civil society organisation in a working-class suburban […]
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ADDED 03/05/2018
FROM 02/27/2018 | Jamestown Foundation
BY Paul Goble
Since becoming president of Uzbekistan in September 2016, following the death of longtime authoritarian leader Islam Karimov, Shavkat Mirziyaev has taken steps to dramatically improve relations with his country’s neighbors and to eliminate some of the most noxious and repressive policies of his predecessor at home (see EDM, January 17, 19, February 8). Some of his critics say […]
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ADDED 03/05/2018
FROM 03/05/2018 | Kyiv Post
BY Oleg Sukhov
Welcome back to 2013. The destruction of the protest tent camp in front of the Verkhovna Rada on March 3 was the latest sign that Ukraine is undergoing a counter-revolution, led by President Petro Poroshenko and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov. The events of March 3 recalled the era of the authoritarian kleptocrat Viktor Yanukovych. Freedom of assembly, […]
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ADDED 02/27/2018
FROM 02/26/2018 | Carnegie Europe
BY RICHARD YOUNGS, SARAH MANNEY
This is the first article of the Reshaping European Democracy Project, an initiative of Carnegie’s Democracy and Rule of Law Program and Carnegie Europe. There is widespread agreement that liberal democracy is in fragile health in its European heartlands. Freedom House’s recently published 2018 report, “Democracy in Crisis,” suggests liberal democratic values are now at serious […]
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