Lhe year 2021 began on January 6 in the chaos of the storming of the Capitol in Washington by Trumpist militants. It ends with the noise of boots on the border between Russia and Ukraine and the closure of the last NGO fighting for human rights in Moscow, Memorial. 2021 has been a good year for dictators and a bad year for democracies which are showing signs of fatigue in times of endless Covid-19.
These signs of depression came from Donald Trump’s United States, when, galvanized by their leader who refused his defeat, his supporters forced the door of the stronghold of American parliamentarians. The images went around the world, widely relayed in authoritarian countries, from Moscow to Beijing, who were delighted to show that democracy was disorder.
Veteran Democrat Joe Biden is struggling to straighten out America’s tarnished image. The astonishment that gripped the country (and the rest of the world) did not last long. Liz Cheney – the daughter of former vice president of George Bush Jr, Dick Cheney, a hawk among the Republican hawks – is nailed to her party’s pillory for daring to be indignant at what happened on the 6th January. And no Republican elected official wants to cast a vote of support for a measure by Joe Biden.
Internationally, it is not much better. The debacle of the withdrawal from Afghanistan which gives the keys to Kabul to the Taliban has a double consequence: an incredulity of the allies who have been placed in front of the fait accompli and a devastating effect on the image of the United States which brandishes the torch of the democracy in Afghanistan to deliver it, twenty years later, to its former masters, to the chagrin of this generation of Afghans and especially of Afghan women who believed in Washington’s promises.
Coup in Khartoum, civil war in Ethiopia
“Our children and grandchildren will do their doctoral thesis on the subject of who won: autocracy or democracy? “, Joe Biden explained in March. If we limit ourselves to this year 2021, it is rather the autocrats who win. Ten years after the start of the civil war, Bashar Al-Assad is still at the head of his country, even if it looks like a field of ruins. Hopes for democratic transitions in Ethiopia and Sudan, backed by Washington and the Europeans, end with a military coup in Khartoum and a civil war against Tigray led by 2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner Abiy Ahmed, in Addis Ababa. In Tunisia, the constitutional coup d’etat of President Kaïs Saïed raises fears of an autocratic turn.
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