WSJ: Why Democracy Is in Retreat
Copenhagen
Why do the good guys keep losing? That was the question that haunted your Global View columnist last week at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit. The annual gathering was initiated in 2018 by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Danish prime minister and secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Democracy Summit, whose American associates in past years have ranged from the Carter Center to the George W. Bush Institute, represents what people once called the vital center in Western politics.
For many summit participants, including Danes furious at Donald Trump’s demands for Greenland, the great global dangers to democracy are Mr. Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Many were mourning Kamala Harris’s defeat in the 2024 elections; others worried about strong showings by Trump-friendly parties across much of Europe.
The truth is that the vital center has been on the back foot in Europe and the U.S. for roughly a decade, and during that time democracy has been in retreat around the world. Joe Biden described global politics as a contest between democracies and autocracies. He left office with his enemies on the march. An oft-cited statistic at the summit: 72% of the world’s population lives under autocratic regimes.
At times, this year’s Democracy Summit sounded inspired and hopeful. Mr. Rasmussen’s address, in which he called for European defense spending to reach 4% or more of gross domestic product, was focused and clear. Boris Johnson’s defense of chlorinated chicken (“Delicious . . . made me the man I am”) accompanied a brilliant analysis of the war in Ukraine. A screening of the first episode of “Zero Day,” a Taiwan-made 10-part series about a Chinese invasion, got a standing ovation.
But these high points couldn’t conceal the internal weaknesses that undermine the world’s democracy advocates. Too many of them, especially in Europe, conflate democracy as process—free elections with a free press to determine who gets to run a particular country—with electoral outcomes. They define a democratic election as one in which the right people win.