The Summit for Democracy needs to include the domestic opposition
Tarunabh Khaitan
The US Capitol in Washington D.C. in 2006. Image: Andrew Bossi, Wikimedia Commons/CC-BY-SA
For the first time since 2001, there are more autocracies in the world than democracies. In 2019, 54% of the world’s population lived in a full-blown autocracy; 35% lived in democracies that were moving in the autocratic direction. This latter category included countries like Brazil, India, Poland, Ukraine, the Philippines, Turkey, and the United States. In just another year, by 2020, 68% of the world was living under authoritarianism, with V-Dem downgrading India—the world’s second most populous country—to an ‘electoral