Democracy weakening amid Covid, says report

Copenhagen, November 22

Democracy is deteriorating across the world, with countries notably taking undemocratic and unnecessary actions to contain the Covid pandemic, an intergovernmental body said in its new report on Monday.

“Many democratic governments are backsliding,” the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or International IDEA, said. The 34-nation organisation said as of August 2021, 64 per cent of countries had taken actions to curb the pandemic that it considered “disproportionate, unnecessary or illegal”. The Swedish-based body said the situation was also getting worse in countries that were not democratic. Autocratic regimes had become “even more brazen in their repression”, it said.

In its flagship report on the state of democracy, International IDEA said the number of backsliding democracies had doubled in the past decade, and mentioned in particular the US, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. — AP