Marine Le Pen, from the National Rally in France (Photo: 123RF)
–
Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won 41.5% of the votes in the French presidential election. This far-right party had dressed up in the colors of the center to better seduce the electorate. He improved his score again.
In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz won 53% of the votes and 68% of the seats in Parliament. After neutralizing the media and enriching his friends, Orbán would tackle a reform of the justice system so that he could appoint judges who were more understanding of the expectations of the state. As did the President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is now getting the judgments he wants. A court has just sentenced businessman Osman Kavala to life imprisonment, and to 18 years of sequestration seven other people who took part in the violent demonstrations in Gezi Park in 2013. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte is more expeditious: he asked the police to kill the drug dealers on the spot.
These populists despise democracy, which prevents them from exercising power as they please. They use social media to manipulate public opinion, muzzle the media, flout civil liberties. They bribe officials and mayors to secure their loyalty, practice nepotism, and enrich their friends. We can also put in this lot Jair Bolsonaro, of Brazil, Narendra Modi, of India, and heads of state of former Soviet republics and Arab countries, such as Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco.
Also part of this populist movement are the leaders of opposition parties from democratic countries, such as Austria, Spain, Sweden, Holland and even Germany, since Angela Merkel brought in a million refugees. .
In short, democracy is in bad shape. The magazine’s Intelligence Unit State of Democracy Index The Economist fell from 5.37 to 5.28 from 2020 to 2021, the largest drop since 2010. It is also the lowest score since 2006, when this index was created. Of the 167 countries listed, only 21 are considered fully democratic. Canada is ranked 12e rank and the United States, at 26e.
The United States is sinking
While the American giant often presents itself as the largest democracy in the world, its democratic health is rather failing. This is evidenced by the failed coup organized by ex-President Donald Trump and his henchmen after his defeat in November 2020 and until January 6, 2021, when hundreds of demonstrators, sometimes armed, invaded the Capitol to prevent the swearing in of President Joe Biden.
Not only did elected Republicans in Congress then try to abort the ceremony, but, in some states, accomplices had previously tried to replace the electors designated by the electoral process by other electors appointed arbitrarily, a highly illegal maneuver. .
Eighteen months after the election of Joe Biden, two-thirds of Republican voters still believe that Trump won the November 2020 election. Worse, 30% of them believe that recourse to violence would be justified to “save the country”. An expression dear to Trump.
This conspiratorial climate is maintained by the vast majority of elected Republicans. Lincoln’s great party no longer thinks politically. It pursues two goals: to collect as much money as possible (election financing is unlimited there) and to replace the democrats in all places of power. He promotes tax cuts for the rich, increases the constraints on the vote of visible minorities, defends an undemocratic electoral system, blocks everything proposed by the Democrats, has conservative judges appointed (they are five out of nine on the Supreme Court ), wants to rewrite history, privatize education, ban sex education in schools, etc. Mary Trump (Donald’s niece) calls him a “fascist”.
stay alert
You would have to be naive not to see the smell of Trump poison rising northward. We also have our populists: Maxime Bernier, Éric Duhaime, Pierre Poilievre, aspiring leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. The latter wants to make Ottawa the capital of cryptocurrencies, abolish the CBC, kill the carbon tax. He breaks the sugar on the elites, plays with the facts and exploits the anger of the left-behind to make political capital.
We must take this current, which is slowly taking hold, as evidenced by the demonstrations in favor of “freedom”, which are organized by activists and which sometimes benefit from American financing, very seriously.
In addition to increasing surveillance of social media and agitators, the state must also concern itself with those who feel neglected and forgotten, who are sometimes easy prey for populists.
The Canadian government should, as professor and researcher Thomas Homer-Dixon proposes, create a non-partisan committee that would receive information from political and social experts that could affect the quality of democracy in Canada and the United States and that could guide it in the means to be taken to counter the dangers, emanating both from outside and from within, and which threaten our democracy. This is far superior to that of the Americans, but it should not be thought that it is not threatened.
***
I love
Common sense finally prevailed and a serious planning error was corrected. Public transit by rail in the east of the island of Montreal will be designed by a team made up of the Quebec Ministry of Transport, the City of Montreal, the Société de transport de Montréal and the Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain. Gone is the route of the Metropolitan Electricity Network (REM) planned by CDPQ Infra on René-Lévesque Boulevard, which disfigured the city center and cannibalized other public transit lines. The network to be built in the east of the city will be connected to existing lines.
I do not like
While the minimum wage in Quebec has just gone from $13.50 an hour to $14.25 on the 1is May, the average compensation of CEOs of the 100 largest Canadian companies was $10.9 million in 2020, or 191 times the average salary of their employees. In the United States, the average compensation of CEOs of the 100 largest companies jumped 31% in 2021, reaching US$20 million, or 254 times (238 times in 2020) the average salary of their employees. This inequity could lead to social disorder. No wonder a wave of unionization is sweeping through Amazon warehouses and targeting 250 Starbucks. President Biden wants to tax the rich more, but the Republican Party prefers to defend those who finance it. In France, President Emmanuel Macron promises to tackle this injustice.
–
