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Last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that President Alexander G. Lukashenko was a ‘cheater’, after which he added: “We refused to acknowledge that he is now in office. We know what the Belarusian people want. Do you want something else. “
Just a month later, Pompeo’s boss, President Trump, borrows Lukashenko’s “ manual ”, joining the club of grumpy leaders who, regardless of what voters want, self-declare themselves winners.
This club is important and includes far more dictators, tyrants and powerful than leaders of countries that are part of a so-called “free world”, countries that, led by Washington, have been teaching others for decades. , explaining that they must hold elections and respect the results.
The parallel is not exactly accurate. Trump has participated in some free and democratic elections. Most dictators go beyond the will of the voters even before they vote, eliminating their real opponents from the elections and spreading waves of distorted information.
But even when they organize a real vote, and the result turns out to be contrary, they often ignore it, denouncing it as the work of traitors, criminals and saboteurs abroad and that, consequently, the vote cannot be validated. By refusing to accept last week’s election result and making efforts to cancel the vote, Trump is therefore following a similar strategy.
Trump is unlikely to override the laws and institutions that care about the verdict of American voters prevailing. The country has a free press, an independent judiciary, electoral officials determined to ensure fair vote counts and strong political opposition, but none of this exists in Belarus or Russia.
Yet the United States has never had to force a candidate to accept an honestly suffered electoral defeat. Or, almost risking the possibility of being forced out of office, Trump has broken the hitherto deeply cemented democratic tradition of a smooth transition.
The damage caused by Trump’s stubbornness could be lasting. Ivan Karstev, an expert on Central and Eastern Europe at the Institute of Humanities in Vienna, says Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his defeat could “set a model” for similar populists in Europe or elsewhere in the world.
“When Trump won the election in 2016, the lesson told them they could trust democracy,” he said. “Now they will no longer believe in democracy and will do everything to stay in power”. He also says that, according to the so-called “Lukashenko scenario”, they will still want to hold the elections, but “they will never lose”. Russian President Vladimir V. Putin has been doing this for two decades.
Trump’s undemocratic tactics include those commonly used by leaders such as Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, and Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, who refuse to accept defeat and make unfounded accusations of election fraud. These tactics also include undermining trust in democratic institutions and courts, attacks on the press and denigrating opponents.
Like Trump, leaders feared that once they leave office, defeat would expose them to accusations. Trump has nothing to fear from being accused of war crimes and genocide, as happened to Milosevic, but he faces a number of legal issues.
Michael McFaul, the US ambassador to Russia at the time of President Barack Obama and also a frequent critic of Trump, described the president’s “refusal to accept the election result” as “a farewell gift to dictators of all. the world”.
An old edition of the “manual” used by leaders who never acknowledged defeat was “written” in 1946 by the Socialist Unity Party, a communist body in the communist-controlled regions of East Germany. Defeated in the first elections held in Germany after World War II, this party, known by the acronym SED, greeted its defeat with a newspaper article with a very high title: “Great SED Victory!”, After which it ruled East Germany for the next 45 years.
He has never risked a truly competitive election again.
When Matyas Rakosi, a Moscow-led leader in Hungary, saw the Communist Party lose the 1945 election, he became “as pale as a corpse and collapsed in his chair without saying a word,” according to an official present. on the spot and who later told Hungarian historians what had happened. Within a year, most of his opponents were dead, in prison or silenced by fear, and he ruled the country.
Nobody expects Trump to follow this terrifying example. But, by claiming to have won a vote whose results clearly show that he has lost, he has moved away from the rules of countries that consider themselves mature democracies.
“Trump’s behavior is unprecedented among the leaders of Western democracy,” said Serhii Plokhy, a Harvard historian who has studied former Communist states like Ukraine. “Even in the case of military dictatorships, more often than not the leaders, rather than respect the electoral results, prefer to withdraw if they have lost them”.
Trump’s refusal to accept the election result had an echo whose reverberations were felt especially in Latin America.
Trump has resorted to almost every leverage available to foreign policy against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who, despite his great lack of popularity and a catastrophic economic crisis, fraudulently declared victory in the May 2018 elections.
The vote was contested by most Western and Latin American states, all arguing that the elections were neither free nor fair, immediately attracting new US sanctions. To punish Maduro, Trump banned Venezuelan bond transactions and imposed drastic sanctions on Venezuelan oil. And in January 2019, Trump recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, who was also president of the Venezuelan Congress, as the country’s legitimate leader, and that meant another blow for Maduro. A few days later, dozens of US European and Latin American allies followed suit.
Trump criticized Maduro, calling him a “ usurper of power ” and said that to remove Maduro from office and install Guaido as president, all options are available, including military intervention.
Back in September, the Trump administration imposed new sanctions on what it believed were “attempts by the Maduro regime to undermine Venezuela’s democratic elections.”
Now even Trump refuses to accept the election result.
Temir Porras, a former Venezuelan government minister who has since left Maduro’s party, says Trump’s refusal to recognize the US vote “cancels” America’s role as the international arbiter of democracy.
“There is no doubt that the ‘moral superiority’ that the United States had is now being influenced by Trump’s behavior,” he said.
Geoff Ramsey, the Venezuelan director of the Washington Office for Latin America, a Washington-based group of researchers, said: “How can the US government expect freer and fairer elections in Venezuela when our president is not do you recognize the electoral process? ” clean from our country? It is a propaganda gift for Maduro and for any other dictator in the world, and I guarantee you that he likes all of this at all times ”.
Of course, Maduro didn’t miss the chance to cheer up. “Donald Trump, we don’t lose the election here because we represent the truth,” Maduro boldly said in his national speech Tuesday.
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