How Democracy Fought Back in 2022

Across America last year, election deniers were defeated in the midterms elections, and President Joe Biden recently signed legislation shoring up the nation’s presidential election certification system. Seemingly against all odds, Ukraine has managed to hold off Russian aggression. And in Iran, China and Brazil, pro-democracy forces scored successes in standing up to authoritarian regimes.

Call it the year democracy fought back. After a shaky start in 2022, the forces of representative government and free and fair elections made critical progress in several places around the world. And while the struggle is far from over, experts say, the wins provide momentum that could be pivotal in world history.

“There are reasons to celebrate democratic victories in 2022 and signs of hope that we could be on the precipice of the fourth wave of democracy,” says Ian Bassin, executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that opposes authoritarianism.

“We’ve been living through a global democratic recession,” Bassin adds. “I think we’ve seen some glimmers of hope in 2022, both in the United States and abroad.”

In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy – perhaps best known, ahead of his election as an actor who played the president on a Ukrainian TV comedy – has led an improbably successful resistance against Russia’s February invasion of his country. While Ukraine has been devastated and its citizens tortured and killed, it has begun to reclaim territory seized by Russia.

In Iran, women and girls outraged over the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who was arrested by Iran’s morality police for “improperly” wearing her hijab, rose up against the regime. In China, street protests against China’s “zero COVID” policy resulted in an easing of draconian lockdowns there.

In Brazil, right-wing incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro narrowly lost reelection to leftists Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva – and there was widespread worry that Bolsonaro and his fervent supporters would not accept the results of the election. While Bolsonaro has not conceded the race, his allies largely have accepted Lula’s win, which was certified Dec. 12 ahead of a scheduled Jan. 1 inauguration, and the institutions of South America’s largest country have continued.

And in America – where the system touted as the world’s greatest democracy had been under threat – anti-democratic forces suffered a damaging, if not definitive, setback.

In the most watched races for secretaries of state, the election deniers all lost their elections in November, meaning the states’ elections will be run by people who are not still insisting – despite massive evidence to the contrary – that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. In some jurisdictions, including Michigan, voting was made easier, such as through automatic voter registration. The Justice Department moved to prosecute insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, sending an undeniable signal that thwarting the peaceful transfer of presidential power would not go unpunished.

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Voter turnout was unusually high for a midterm election, cheering activists who worried that efforts to discredit the elections system would keep people from the polls.

“We wanted democracy to survive, and it really was on the brink of collapsing,” says Bishop Dwayne Royster, executive director of POWER, a faith-based grassroots group that works for racial and social justice. “People turned out to vote,” even if at first they showed little interest in the campaign,” adds Royster, who favored the Democratic candidates for Senate and the governorship in Pennsylvania.

Globally, the momentum is on the side of democracy, says Bassin, who notes that pro-democracy movements tend to be infectious, such as in the Arab Spring.

“I think it’s probably no coincidence that you started to see stirrings of the freedom movements in Iran and China after the Ukrainians defied expectations and held on” to their territory, he says.

But experts and activists warn that the state of democracy is still very fragile and that apparent pro-democratic advances overseas may be overstated.

In China, “there is no democracy,” and the communist government’s concession to protesters “probably staved off a threat to its rule and thus won a small victory for autocracy” in averting a more consequential uprising, says Benjamin Friedman, policy director at the group Defense Priorities. Ukraine, he says, is a “weak democracy” made more tenuous by the war, even as it holds off Russia.

And in the United States, wins by pro-democracy forces were often narrow, showing the vulnerability still exists, experts say.

“It was a good year for democracy and not such a good year for autocrats around the world,” says Simon Rosenberg, president of the centrist Democratic group NDN. But “this is still very much up in the air.”