Making sense of the goings on in the British parliament these past few weeks, over Prime Minister Theresa May’s proposals for UK’s final exit from the European Union, is truly confounding. The acrimony, bad blood, bitterness, ruthless inter-party and intra-party savagery saw the hapless leader fighting simultaneously for three things: saving the badly fractured United Kingdom from potential national disintegration; ensuring regime survival; and valiantly staving off intra-party challenges to her remaining as the head of Her Majesty’s government. These are, without dispute, Herculean tasks! I pitied her, as she simultaneously fought off hawkish members in her own ruling coalition and the savage opposition reaching straight for her jugular. It was vicious struggle for dear life, much like one between a hapless gazelle in a desperate struggle to escape from the deadly grip of a ferocious and hungry lion. Politics just doesn’t get any bloodier than that!
British parliamentary form of liberal democracy subjects the leader of government to daily harangues and relentless bombardments from the Opposition bench. Theresa May has, temporarily, survived the proverbial “Night of the Long Knives.” The UK got itself into this intractable political mess when the former Prime Minister Donald Cameron called for a referendum to decide whether the UK should stay in or leave the European Union. To his consternation, majority voted to leave the EU, and this democratic decision has turned out a horrible nightmare that Britons now wish had never happened. Unfortunately, those politicians and polemicists (Boris Johnson, et al) whose virulently anti-EU rhetoric roused the people to vote for Brexit chickened out, abandoning responsibility to an anti-Brexit Theresa May to now pilot the nation through the tortuous labyrinthine negotiations. The truth is that whichever way it finally turns out, the United Kingdom is still the loser! And as things currently stand, it will require uncommon political sagacity and statesmanship to manage the eventual outcomes, for it carries grave implications for the future and corporate survival of the United Kingdom.
One take away from it all is how truly chaotic liberal democracy has turned out to be! Though the British have perfected and practised this Westminster form of liberal democratic system for centuries, it still does not necessarily make it any less cumbersome, ponderous and chaotic, as every prime minister has to literally stay permanently awake, watching out for the perennial shenanigans of opponents and dissenters within the ruling party, as well as from the opposition parties across the aisle. It is thus the destiny of prime ministers to constantly fend off intra-party challenges to leadership and from the opposition bench angling to bring the government down. Indeed, this parliamentary system is intrinsically chaotic, and Britain is only the latest victim of its inherent mortal flaws and instabilities. Italy has for decades emblematized that chaos. Since the end of the Second World War, it has had no fewer than 61 governments, with prime ministers going and coming as if they are riding a revolving door!
Some credit must go to the founding fathers of the American state, for their ingenuity and foresightedness in creatively tinkering with the British model, making it less chaotic to guarantee greater stability in government. Instead of the fusion of executive and legislative powers in parliament, they innovated with clear and unambiguous separation of the powers of government into three coordinate compartments, i.e., legislature, executive and judiciary. They settled for a strong executive presidency. But as it is with all political systems, it contains its own peculiar contradictions and flaws. For example, disagreements between the executive and legislature over budgets have been known to lead to mutual muscle-flexing, political grandstanding that needlessly create gridlocks and occasional government shutdowns, but nothing compared to the magnitude of instabilities and chaos of the parliamentary system.
Perhaps until the recent political rumblings across Europe, not much attention had been paid to the inherently chaotic, fatal, threatening and disruptive nature of liberal democracy. But they are coming to the fore more forcefully with the increasingly contagious, extreme right-wing, anti-establishment populism sweeping across Europe’s political landscape. If anything, these catastrophic manifestations in Britain, the violent and virulent anti-Macron mass protests in France, and the upsurge of extreme right-wing populism in places like Germany, Hungary, Poland and others, are being egged on by the Donald Trump example, causing political leaders across the globe to begin to rethink the utility, feasibility and sustainability of liberal democracy. This is also giving oxygen to democracy’s mortal enemies and principal traducers to harden their opposition to it.
As recent studies have shown, the decline of liberal democracy, a system which has been under consistent assault, is being aided from within the ranks of its own adherents, rather than from outside forces, as was the case during the Cold War. Rather than ideological adversaries assaulting and subverting it from outside, liberal democracy is under grave threats from its own unresolved internal contradictions, which its traducers of course are merely capitalizing upon. Harvard University professors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, have shown in their latest seminal book, How Democracies Die (2018), that when democracies die, they do so no longer via the instrumentalities of revolution or coup d’état as in the past, but often times from within, by institutional atrophy, and from gradual but deliberate internal subversion by those, such as Donald Trump and Viktor Orban, who came to power by democratic elections.
On their own, Third World leaders are paying close attention to the disruptions and chaos currently wracking the very bastions of liberal democratic order, the former colonial countries that had imposed it upon them. Since this did not have any deep roots either in the culture of the respective colonized nations or even in the authoritarian and unaccountable colonial rule itself, it took less than half a decade for it to catastrophically unravel through coups d’états, assassinations, and programmed retreat into one-party dictatorships. Though democratic rule was later restored from the 1990s, as a Western-imposed political conditionality after the Cold War, it has however begun to suffer serious setbacks and reversals in recent years. Africa’s autocrats have become quite adept at manipulating the levers of democratic rule – multi-partyism, written constitutions, periodic elections, adult suffrage, and stipulated term limits – to ensure that they remain in power perpetually until death! Robert Mugabe, at 94 years had to be removed by a coup after 36 years in power; Paul Biya, at 85 years old and in power since 1982, only recently ‘won’ victory for another seven-year term of office as president of Cameroon; Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame, in power since 1986 and 1994 respectively, have tinkered with constitutions to remain in power for as long as they please. The list is long! And they have China and Russia to draw inspiration from. These two exemplify the strongman rule that African rulers are jealous of. It is perhaps not for nothing that African leaders are cozying up to China, a one-party Communist dictatorship, whose model they find attractive.
Judging from its debilitating contradictions and internal discontents, the questions that may justifiably be posed are many: has liberal democracy exhausted its possibilities and come to the end of its tethers? Is it still capable of self-re-invention and reforms, or we are witnessing its gradual but inexorable denouement? For Africa and other parts of the developing world where democracy had never really been deeply rooted, are these chaotic manifestations not themselves a great disincentive to persuading autocrats and dictators to adopt it? With the exception of democratic exemplars like Botswana, Ghana, Senegal, South Africa and few others, Africans may just be witnessing the gradual withering away of liberal democracy as their leaders increasingly admire and emulate the stability of strongman rule in China. The enemies and traducers of liberal democracy in Africa may finally be gaining an upper hand.
- Professor Fawole is of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife.
