Please answer the following question in APA STYLE ; 350 words; USING ONLY THE SOURCES PROVIDED
KENNETH ROTH is Executive Director of Human Rights Watch.
The Age of Zombie Democracies
Why Autocrats Are Abandoning Even the Pretense
of Democratic Rituals
BY KENNETH ROTH July 28, 2021
Over the past decade, autocrats around the world have perfected the
technique of “managed” or “guided” democracy. In Belarus, Egypt,
Russia, Uganda, Venezuela, and elsewhere, authoritarian leaders have
held periodic elections to enhance their legitimacy but monopolized the
media, restricted civil society, and manipulated state institutions and
resources to ensure that they remained in power.
Such methods are never foolproof, however, and their effectiveness has
diminished as citizens have wised up and learned to operate within
rigged systems. A growing number of autocrats have thus been forced to
rely on ever starker forms of repression: they still hold periodic elections
since their people have come to expect them, but they do not even
pretend that these empty rituals are free or fair. The result has been the
proliferation of what might be called “zombie democracies”—the living
dead of electoral political systems, recognizable in form but devoid of any
The Age of Zombie Democracies | Foreign Affairs https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1127636
1 of 8 8/3/21, 4:48 PM
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1127636#author-info
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1127636#author-info
substance.
Just as autocrats have moved from managed to zombie democracy, so too
must supporters of human rights evolve. Whereas they could once
counter managed democracy by attacking particular autocratic techniques
—restrictions on civil society, say, or arrests of journalists—they must
now fight zombie democracy with a more frontal approach, one that
deprives autocrats of the legitimacy they seek from electoral charades.
CREEPING ZOMBIES
Traditional dictatorships make no pretense of democracy. The Saudi and
Emirati monarchies don’t even bother to hold direct national elections.
Nor does the Chinese Communist Party; its kin in Cuba, North Korea,
and Vietnam; or the unapologetically authoritarian governments of post-
Soviet Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Other
authoritarian regimes, such as the military junta in Myanmar that has
killed hundreds of protesters and imprisoned thousands more since it
seized power in February, have overthrown elected governments and
dispensed with democracy altogether.
But in a growing number of countries, governments have cloaked their
autocratic rule in the garb of democracy—only to strip away this thin
disguise to the point of risibility in recent years. A good example is
Russia, which has hurtled toward zombie democracy status in large part
due to opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s repeated end runs around the
Kremlin’s managed democracy. The Kremlin had long kept the opposition
in check by manipulating public opinion through its dominance of state-
run television and other media. But Navalny evaded Moscow’s
information controls by producing slick documentaries about the corrupt
dealings of President Vladimir Putin that garnered tens of millions of
The Age of Zombie Democracies | Foreign Affairs https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1127636
2 of 8 8/3/21, 4:48 PM
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-02-06/digital-dictators
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-02-06/digital-dictators
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2016-09-11/fragile-states-and-next-president
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2016-09-11/fragile-states-and-next-president
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2019-01-03/how-hit-russia-where-it-hurts
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2019-01-03/how-hit-russia-where-it-hurts
views on YouTube.
After allowing Navalny to run for mayor of Moscow in 2013, when he
secured 23 percent of the vote, the Kremlin barred his party as well as
other genuinely independent opposition parties from participating in
elections. In 2019, however, Navalny circumvented that restriction by
encouraging Russians to vote for candidates from the tame pseudo-
opposition parties that the Kremlin had allowed—a “smart voting”
strategy aimed at undercutting the ruling United Russia party. Russian
authorities responded by banishing Navalny to a penal colony, seeking to
criminalize as an “extremist” any candidate who supported him, and
tarring some of the country’s remaining independent media outlets as
“foreign agents.” Russia will continue to hold elections, but without even
the pretense of a genuine opposition or free public debate.
Putin’s ideological bedfellows in Belarus and Hungary have taken their
countries down a similar path toward zombie democracy in Europe. In
office since 1994, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has relied
on restrictions on the media and civil society to maintain tight control of
his country. When he sought a sixth term in office in 2020, he likely
assumed he would coast to an easy victory after detaining the main
opposition candidates. But the public rallied around Svetlana
Tikhanovskaya, the wife of one of the jailed opposition politicians,
forcing Lukashenko to resort to blatant electoral fraud and mass
detention and torture of protesters. Later, his government prosecuted
critical journalists and human rights defenders and liquidated dozens of
civil society groups and independent media outlets. He even went as far
as forcing down a commercial flight to arrest a leading opposition figure.
Hungary has taken a different route to zombie democracy. After coming
The Age of Zombie Democracies | Foreign Affairs https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1127636
3 of 8 8/3/21, 4:48 PM
to power for a second time in 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orban took
control of much of the country’s media, replaced independent judges with
handpicked ones, imposed restrictions on civil society groups,
gerrymandered electoral districts, and deployed public funds to maintain
a large majority in parliament. But Orban’s strategy began to fail in 2019,
when his party lost local elections in many large cities. Now, faced with
the possibility that his party could lose next year’s parliamentary election
to a unified opposition, Orban is moving to ensure that his party will
control the state regardless of who is in government. His party has
quietly taken control of the boards that run many state institutions and is
creating foundations run by cronies that will control many state resources
and operate beyond the oversight of the legislature.
Zombie democracy has also taken root in Latin America, most notably in
Venezuela and Nicaragua. After Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro’s
ruling party lost parliamentary elections in 2015, he used his control over
electoral and judicial authorities to ensure that future elections would be
neither free nor fair. The Supreme Court allowed government supporters
to take over opposition parties, and security forces detained opposition
leaders and brutalized their supporters to eliminate the possibility of an
opposition victory. In response to international pressure, Maduro’s
government recently appointed two officials associated with the
opposition to the country’s National Electoral Council, but it remains to
be seen if this concession will meaningfully improve electoral conditions.
In Nicaragua, President Daniel Ortega has grown steadily more
autocratic as well. When large-scale protests against his rule erupted in
2018, his government responded with murderous repression: the police
and heavily armed pro-government groups carried out a brutal
The Age of Zombie Democracies | Foreign Affairs https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1127636
4 of 8 8/3/21, 4:48 PM
crackdown on demonstrators that left more than 300 people dead and
2,000 injured. The government detained hundreds more and has carried
out another wave of arrests in the lead-up to presidential elections slated
for November of this year. Seven presidential candidates and at least 20
critics have been arrested, leaving Ortega to run for his fourth
consecutive term effectively unopposed.
The Middle East and Africa have not escaped the scourge of zombie
democracy, either. After the coalition government of Turkish President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan lost mayoral elections in 2019 to candidates
fielded by an opposition alliance, Erdogan escalated his attacks on a pro-
Kurdish party that had supported alliance candidates, removing and
jailing its mayors, green-lighting a court case to shutter the party, and
redoubling efforts to prevent its charismatic former co-chair, Selahattin
Demirtas, from leaving the prison cell where he has spent the last four
and a half years. In the face of declining public support, Erdogan has
sought to eviscerate independent media and exerts control over the
courts. His coalition also appears to be preparing to alter legislation on
elections and political parties without consulting other parties, raising
concerns that the 2023 election could be less than fair.
In Egypt, General turned President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and his military
junta have sought to foreclose the possibility of victory by an independent
party such as the Muslim Brotherhood (which won the last fair
presidential election in 2012) by imposing the most repressive rule in the
country’s modern history: shutting down independent media, harassing
civil society groups, and detaining tens of thousands of people. In 2018,
Sisi was reelected with an official—and laughable—97 percent of the
vote. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, meanwhile, was reelected
The Age of Zombie Democracies | Foreign Affairs https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1127636
5 of 8 8/3/21, 4:48 PM
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-03-26/illiberal-tide
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-03-26/illiberal-tide
earlier this year with a less commanding 58.6 percent of the vote, but
only after his security forces arrested his main opponent and brutalized
and killed many of his supporters.
Finally, Hong Kong has also taken on some of the characteristics of a
zombie democracy. An election process that allowed pro-Beijing
constituencies to choose half of the members of the governing Legislative
Council had long guaranteed a pro-mainland majority. But after a
landslide victory in the 2019 local elections amid large-scale protests,
pro-democracy candidates briefly threatened to prevail in the next
Legislative Council election by using an informal primary system.
Participants in that system are now being prosecuted, however, and all
opposition activity has been shut down under a harsh national security
law imposed by Beijing.
THE AUTOCRAT’S ACHILLES’ HEEL
The problem of zombie democracies has become so acute that
governments committed to promoting genuine democracy need a
strategy to address it. For decades, the standard response to managed
democracies has been to attack their tools of electoral manipulation one
by one—calling out censorship, opposing limits on civil society, or
defending the rights of opposition candidates—to nudge these
governments back toward allowing broader civic engagement, unfettered
media, judicial independence, and free and fair elections.
But countering zombie democracies requires a more holistic approach.
Their leaders have given up trying to manage popular opinion in favor of
quashing it, but even the worst zombie democracies rely on some degree
of popular consent, coerced as it may be. That gives those seeking to
promote genuine democracy a point of leverage.
The Age of Zombie Democracies | Foreign Affairs https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1127636
6 of 8 8/3/21, 4:48 PM
The United States and other like-minded democracies should continue to
denounce the censorship and other abusive tactics that zombie
democracies use to silence their critics, as well as the political and legal
machinations they employ to empty democracy of its meaning. They
should also stop providing sustenance to the leaders of zombie
democracies, be it U.S. military aid and arms sales to Sisi or European
Union subsidies for Orban.
But countries seeking to promote genuine democracy should go a step
further and hit the leaders of zombie democracies where it hurts the
most—exposing the corruption and self-dealing that sustain their
regimes. Because zombie democrats no longer trust even a manipulated
public to back them, they increasingly rely on cronies in the military and
the private sector to prop up their rule. But generals and oligarchs are
rarely true believers in zombie democracy. Their loyalty must be bought
through the diversion of public funds, which is the autocrat’s Achilles’
heel.
Democratic governments should spotlight the ways in which the leaders
of zombie democracies advance their private interests at the public’s
expense. Sisi and Orban have both left public hospitals decrepit while
paying off their cronies. The Kremlin has allowed friendly billionaire
oligarchs to prosper while cutting pensions and letting wages stagnate.
Maduro has paid off the army while the people of Venezuela suffer a
humanitarian crisis. Similar critiques could be made of most leaders of
zombie democracies.
Sadly, U.S. President Joe Biden missed the chance to hammer Putin for
his corrupt self-dealing at the summit between the two leaders in Geneva
in June. Biden later said that he spoke to Putin “about the violation of
The Age of Zombie Democracies | Foreign Affairs https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1127636
7 of 8 8/3/21, 4:48 PM
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2018-03-05/world-after-trump
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2018-03-05/world-after-trump
Copyright © 2021 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
All rights reserved. To request permission to distribute or reprint this article, please
visit ForeignAffairs.com/Permissions.
Source URL: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/americas/2021-07-28/age-
zombie-democracies
human rights,” but apart from a brief mention of Navalny, there is no
public record of what he said. That means the Russian people didn’t get
to hear Biden criticize Putin and his oligarch friends for getting rich by
appropriating state resources and then gutting the country’s democracy so
they don’t have to answer for their actions.
Biden did a better job of highlighting the corruption of the Cuban
government, after nationwide pro-democracy protests erupted earlier this
month. He publicly accused Cuba’s authoritarian leaders of “enriching
themselves” instead of protecting people from “the pandemic and from
the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have
been subjected.” That kind of pointed criticism resonates far more with
the citizens of authoritarian countries than a perfunctory note about
“human rights” being privately mentioned.
The best way to undermine zombie democracies is to demonstrate that
their leaders are indifferent to the publics they pretend to serve. Yes,
autocrats can resort to brutality to cling to power, but that is a dangerous
game. Even the most committed dictators have a hard time hanging on
when the public has completely turned on them. To hasten the arrival of
such reckonings, Biden and other democratic leaders should stress how,
in their quest to retain power, the leaders of zombie democracies have
utterly forsaken their people.
The Age of Zombie Democracies | Foreign Affairs https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1127636
8 of 8 8/3/21, 4:48 PM
https://foreignaffairs.com/permissions
https://foreignaffairs.com/permissions
