It can be in Colombia or in Spain, in the United States or in Russia. The new script for seizing political power and destroying democratic institutions is clear, predictable, and effective. It is the most viable Machiavellian operation in this world where military coups, invasion wars, violent revolutions and perpetuation in power are increasingly repudiated by the citizen and universal conscience.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill uttered a famous phrase that serves to legitimize democracy as the best of political systems. However, with his English humor he left open a door to the weaknesses of this system: “Democracy is the worst system of government designed by man, except for all the others.”
Indeed, nobody, or almost nobody, would at this moment think of openly defending contemporary tyrannies or new-type dictatorships or bare-faced authoritarianism. However, these systems continually try to resurface because clinging to absolute power, totalitarian or populist, is one of the most deeply rooted temptations among human ambitions. It was to those regimes that Churchill was referring.
So, as these authoritarian systems are increasingly repelled by conscious and educated citizens, the smartest have invented a fraudulent formula to disguise their purposes by manipulating the rules of the democratic game. In short: use democracy to destroy it.
The populist, dictatorial and even tyrannical systems of today do not begin their journey with a violent coup. He entered the dynamics and institutions of the democratic system with an apocalyptic demagogic discourse.
These are some of the steps in the predictable script. First of all, they manipulate the poor, the most vulnerable, presenting themselves as messiahs, as saviors.
They take advantage of frequent cases of corruption to spread the idea that all parties are corrupt, all politicians are opportunistic and dishonest, and that all of the above has been a failure.
These groups, moreover, are armed with a well-spun program in which it appears as the only alternative to purify and reinvent the democratic system that has been corrupted, that has no alternatives, that cannot be reformed or renewed if it is not with the messiah and his national salvation party. To do this, these foundations establish absolute control of the media and the educational and cultural system.
Populism exacerbates nationalism, jingoism, and class struggle to destroy anyone who opposes the “good of the people.” The depersonalized masses inflamed by the illusion that “now we are going to fix everything” voted convinced that the “good to know” is much better than “the bad known.”
In short, the solution for the voter seems to be to choose the “enlightened” in the democratic elections, the “strong man”, who seems to have the keys to earthly paradise. And with it, enthrone the only “movement”, the nascent party or guerrilla recycled into a “non-traditional” political group, because the script says that everything traditional is old, corrupt and finished.
As “no one chastises someone else’s totalitarianism, authoritarianism or populism”, the ballot boxes are defined in vindictive trenches, in barricades against everything established. You do not vote for the one with the most merit, the most training to serve or the one with the most experience. Neither do you vote for the one who has shown the greatest integrity or for the one with the most coherent and realistic program.
They vote for the illusionist utopia, not for those small utopias that push us forward knowing that every time they think they have conquered them, they will recede like the horizon. They vote for “paradise” for the poor, even though whoever or those who hold it has unpresentable, authoritarian and violent histories.
And when these characters are elected by democratic methods, legitimized by a Constitution, in free, plural, competitive elections monitored by civil society and international auditors, democracy begins to erode from within.
The first step is to “penetrate” the three powers of the rule of law, for which they put people “faithful” to the cause of “cleaning up” the institutions. They will not be the best public servants or the least corrupt, but the “unconditional” ones who are obedient to the “chosen one”. And these, from within, open cracks, require normal conflict in irreconcilable conflicts and attack the “old traditional institutions” to change them.
Once the leader and his followers have taken over the democratic institutions and have eaten away at them, almost imperceptibly, they deal the redemptive blow so that the new structures are supported by a reform of the Constitution. At the same time, he is working on the bases so that the legitimate demands become destructive violence of civil society, but dividing compatriots.
Finally, the drafting of a new Constitution is called for, in which the structures that will perpetuate the leader in power, who uses democracy itself to destroy it, are created.
It is enough to pay attention to the political evolution of certain countries to verify that this script, designed to destroy democracy through the use of democratic mechanisms, is repeated with slight nuances. In essence, the peoples, for
lack of civic and political education, they allow themselves to be swept away by these siren songs. And again.
This has happened in countries with a totalitarian past, where after a democratic period they turned to another variant of authoritarianism. Cuba has experienced dictatorships of the right and of the left, populism and this totalitarianism. Hopefully we learn from these lessons of history so that in the future we will not collide with the same stone again… or with other similar ones. Never more.
*Director and founder of the Center for Coexistence Studies. Agronomist, from the University of Pinar del Río, Cuba, and former member of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace from 1999 to 2006. (@Latinoamerica21).
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