COVID-19 ‘slowly killing democracy’

The pandemic triggered a ‘huge rollback of freedoms’, giving 2020 the lowest score in an annual democracy index compiled for the past 15 years.

The effects of a stage four lockdown on Melbourne last year. Picture: Ian Currie

The coronavirus pandemic triggered a “huge rollback of democratic freedoms,” giving 2020 the lowest score in an annual democracy index compiled for the past 15 years.

The 2020 Democracy Index from the Economist Intelligence Unit found that democracy had deteriorated in all seven regions of the world for the first time since 2010, driven by government measures to address the emergency.

While the biggest regressions were in authoritarian regions, the report said “the removal of individual liberties in development democracies was the most remarkable feature of 2020”.

The democracy score for the Middle East fell to its lowest level since the Arab uprisings of the early 2010s as governments reasserted authoritarian instincts after the previous year of widespread protest. “The damaging effects of coronavirus on economic prospects and personal freedoms had the effect of limiting open opposition to the authorities,” the report said, warning that 2021 could see a new eruption of instability.

In sub-Saharan Africa, authoritarian leaders used a heavy hand to introduce and enforce lockdowns and in some places actively exploited the pandemic to crack down on opposition. “Typically, the strategy in Africa was to make lockdowns as short as possible, which meant that they were enforced ruthlessly by the police,” the report said. “During the early weeks of a local lockdown, more Nigerians died at the hands of police than from coronavirus.”

In Uganda, constraints on political activity, applied disproportionately to the opposition, “illustrated how autocrats use the excuse of new threats such as coronavirus to crack down on the opposition and hold on to power”.

The single biggest downgrades, however, in Hong Kong and Myanmar, were driven by factors unrelated to coronavirus – a crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong and mass voter disenfranchisement and suppression in Myanmar even before Monday’s military coup.

The most striking feature of this year’s index was the loss of civil liberties as a result of government measures in developed democracies.

“The willing surrender of fundamental freedoms by millions of people was perhaps one of the most remarkable occurrences in an extraordinary year,” Joan Hoey, the report’s author noted, saying that while people accepted the measures it did not mean governments could not be criticised.

Three Asian countries hailed for their early and successful coronavirus interventions – Japan, South Korea and Taiwan – were all upgraded from flawed democracies to full democracies in 2020. Hong Kong moved from a flawed democracy to a hybrid regime after Beijing’s crackdown on dissent.

Harsh coronavirus measures pushed France and Portugal from full democracies to flawed democracies. The United States remains a flawed democracy after falling out of the full democracy category in 2016 amid ebbing public trust in institutions but gained slightly in civil liberties.

The Times