Publisher: How is the health of democracies doing?

Rankings on the health of democracies, for obvious reasons, always arouse great interest from the population. Perhaps we could say that, especially in Brazil, a country where such an experience has always been a major concern among scholars on the subject. Many adjectives have already been used to define our democratic experience. The historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, for example, used to say that, in our case, it was never more than a big misunderstanding. In a country with the historical experience of slavery and predatory colonialism - inducing great social and economic inequalities - the historian is not without his reasons.

In Brazil, everything is a kind of provisional concession of our clumsy, insane and lewd elite. It was like that with the institutional liberation of slaves, it has been like that with our educational system - split into an education for the poor and blacks and another for the rich whites - and, of course, it would be no different with democracy. Uncertainty, inherent in democratic processes, was never on the menu of this insensitive elite. Until recently, in 2016, some adjustments were made in the democratic process, precisely to satisfy their interests, supposedly harmed by meeting the humanitarian demands of the bottom floor of the social pyramid.

For very little, the autocratic process did not escalate once and for all. Attempts have taken place. Fortunately, some strategic actors did not endorse such maneuvers. We've written a long editorial here on the blog dealing with the health of our democracy. It was one of the most read and celebrated editorials among readers. There are, as I inform in that text, some bodies that monitor the health of democracies around the world. Yesterday, the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, through its Institute Variations of Democracy, published its ranking, where Brazil appears as the 4th most vulnerable or threatened democracy on the planet.

Among the indicators listed by that Institute - to reach the level of harassment - only the indicator of freedom of association would not have been reduced. In all other items, we have suffered some form of harassment. We are only ahead of countries like Poland, Hungary and Turkey, now classified as autocratic regimes. Victor Orban and Recep Erdogan, who govern Hungary and Turkey respectively, are considered despots. Our democracy, as I said before, has structural, historical problems. There are some new variables, such as the rearrangement of international financial capitalism, whose cumulative dynamics started to demand more closed political regimes and states more consistent with this logic, hence the strengthening of the Executive power - to the detriment of the Legislative and the Judiciary - a premise quite common among these new autocratic experiences.

By admitting the so-called waves of autocracies, such as that of 1994 - although they do not enter into the merits of how these waves were formed - the Instituto Variações da Democracia, converges with our reasoning. It is very important to mention here the indicators measured by that Institute in order to reach these conclusions. See where we suffer autocratic harassment: a) Degree of freedom of action by the Judiciary and the Legislature; b) Freedom of expression for the population; c) Dissemination of false information by official bodies; d) Repression of civil society demonstrations; e) Freedom of the press; f) Freedom from political opposition.