European democracy is weakening, report warns

euronews (in English)

Traditionally stable European countries are seeing the rule of law deteriorate as voter turnout and democratic legitimacy decline worldwide, International IDEA said, highlighting concerns over France, the Netherlands and Spain.

Transcript

00:00Trust in participation in elections all over the world is declining for eight years in a row.

00:06Something that is also happening in Europe, as the Global State of Democracy Report states.

00:12For Europe, polarization in politics is one of the issues, says Sam van der Staak,

00:18the director of International Ideas Europe program.

00:21It's countries that have been in the news, but also a lot of countries that as an outsider you wouldn't suspect.

00:28Countries like Greece and Bulgaria and Spain and Portugal and the Netherlands and outside the EU the United Kingdom.

00:37They're still very healthy functioning democracies, but you see that in parts of the system things are cracking.

00:44And that's often because of the politics is really putting a lot of pressure on how democracy functions.

00:49There's more polarization, there's more pressure from political parties to say things need to change.

00:57And of course there's a lot of citizens that are dissatisfied by the way that democracy is delivering on their everyday concerns.

01:03But not everything is bad news in Europe.

01:06For van der Staak, the improvement in Central and Eastern European countries is closing the divide between old established democracies and newer ones,

01:14helping Europe come together.

01:16The State of Democracy Report identifies, however, two main causes to explain why politics loses credibility.

01:22We've seen it in countries like France, Spain, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, all across Europe there's been votes for the extremes

01:32that after the election stay out of power and people then wonder why go and vote at all.

01:37There's also the pressure from outside.

01:39So we see that there's forces such as Russia, but also other authoritarian powers

01:46that try to abuse this weakness that we're seeing to stir even more dissatisfaction.

01:53So there's a pressure from outside through disinformation, through cyber attacks on elections, through foreign funding.

02:00For van der Staak, elections worldwide are a source of concern with 10% lower participation than 15 years ago

02:08and with 20% of recent years elections where the losing candidate does not accept the outcome.

02:15Thank you very much.

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