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An authoritarian tsunami around the world
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Aftonbladet editorial page he is independently a social democrat.
Photo: Alex Brandon / TT NEWS AGENCY
If the US presidential elections were free and fair, Donald Trump would in all likelihood lose. Therefore, it does everything possible so that it is not free and fair.
For several months now, he has been undermining the credibility of election results by claiming that mail-order votes open the door to cheating. He has cut resources for the post office to prevent first votes from arriving on time, and Republicans are working to get opposition voters out of the polls.
Stop vote counting
In several of the leading wave states, Republicans control the state Congress and at this time there was speculation that they would not approve the election result if Joe Biden wins. Especially if on Election Day Trump repeats accusations of election fraud or demands that the vote counting be stopped.
That Donald Trump does not intend to be deposed in a democratic election should come as no surprise. In Russia, Vladimir Putin was elected in 2000 and quickly manipulated the system to stay. In Hungary, the equally authoritarian Viktor Orbán was elected in the country’s last free elections in 2010. He later amended the constitution and the electoral law and cannot be removed.
Can it succeed?
Since the fall of the wall, in the West it seems that we live in the illusion that history only goes in one direction, towards democracy. But it is rather in waves, and right now an authoritarian tsunami is sweeping the world.
The question is not whether Donald Trump intends to try to cheat. The question is whether it succeeds.
Also, don’t be surprised if SD tries the same in Sweden to win power. Already in the last elections, SVT revealed that the party has created a group on Facebook to report on “electoral fraud”, that is, the same strategy as Donald Trump to undermine the electoral result. On SD-close websites, it was recounted how a Danish “election observer”, Michael Aastrup Jensen, viewed the election with harsh words.
The story was false, he was not an electoral observer but a right-wing Randers politician in Jutland. But a record number of voter fraud reports, more than 400, were filed after the elections.
The manual is open
– They started talking already last winter about rigged elections. It is in the whole context of the alt-right to mistrust the system, Christer Mattsson, an expert on Nazi movements at the Segerstedt Institute, told Expressen.
In 2018, neither SD nor the rest of the far right had real power to manipulate the election result. But what about the future? The manual is open in front of us.
Can what we see in the US happen?
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