I was kind of chuffed, in that blows-against-the-empire way, last week to find one of the various strongmen who rule much of the world taken down a peg at the polls.
As Anjali Mody reported from Chennai, India, “After a decade of increasingly unchecked power, Narendra Modi has been cut down to size.”
The Hindu nationalist prime minister didn’t lose, exactly. After the votes were counted in the world’s largest democracy he’s still in power, for his third term, one of those Putinesque players who clearly wants to serve a life sentence in the office.
But not only did his self-founded party do far worse than it was expected to do before the election — a “thumping victory” was predicted — he no longer even has a majority in parliament and will have to form a coalition government.
These are not the kinds of results your religiously inflammatory, anti-Muslim, authoritarian despots like to see.
Like the czar wannabe in the Kremlin, who surrounds himself with Orthodox icons and archbishops in his formerly atheist state, Mody writes of Modi: he “recently claimed that his birth was not a ‘biological’ event but that he had been sent by God.”
But the Indian people weren’t buying his second coming bit any longer.
Still, yeah, you couldn’t be more right that it’s only my clearly delusional perpetual optimism about progress in this world that could make me believe we’re really on the road back to worldwide actual democracy we thought we were on when the Soviet Union collapsed and China opened up to the West some 40 years ago.
The end of history prediction was inaccurate.
Because last week at the beginning of balloting in European Parliament elections, voters in the 27 EU countries were expected to give big gains to hard-right nationalists all over the continent.
Giorgia Meloni, who comes from a party founded from the ashes of Mussolini’s Fascist movement, is already prime minister in Italy. Marine Le Pen, heir to her father’s National Rally racist, xenophobic party, has a legitimate chance to become president of France. And the very idea that the far-right Alternative for Germany party is a legitimate player in that country’s politics is more than scary. It’s the last nation the world wants to see go all Fourth Reich on us, because it is so very good at it. Geert Wilders, a nationalist menace, has power in the Netherlands, of all places. Finland and Greece are flirting with illiberal authoritarians, and you’ve always got to watch out for Spain. This is not even to mention the promoters of intolerance in countries not long used to open societies anyway: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. Poland recently swung back from the brink by electing a moderate, but it’s always in play for more strongmen.
Big guys who like to dictate are not always on the right — not by any means. China is nominally Communist, but Xi sees himself as an old-fashioned emperor. Cuba continues to be just communistically awful. And with Nicolás Maduro, Socialist president of Venezuela, we have been witness to the ruination of a formerly wildly rich oil-pumping nation with a regime that has caused millions of people to flee.
Tyranny rules the day and the nighttime too all over Africa and Southeast Asia. And the Middle East, well, the bonesaw-wielding princes, don’t mess with them. And how would the college kids like a taste of Hamas, whose bosses don’t believe that spousal rape is rape, and kill gays for being gay?
As ever, my optimism is misplaced. But a person still likes to hope against hope at a little bit of good political news.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com
