From Sri Lanka to Tunisia: Democracy under threat

A scorpion wants to cross the stream and asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates because it is afraid the

scorpion will sting it. The scorpion argues that if it does so both would drown. The frog then agrees and starts swimming while carrying the scorpion on its back. Mid-stream, the scorpion stings the frog. The dying frog asks the ungrateful stranger why he did so knowing well both would die. The scorpion replies: “I couldn’t help it. It’s in my nature.”

This Russian or Persian fable well describes the unpleasant nature of the power-packed executive presidency, with democracy being depicted by the ill-fated frog.  If the frog had worn protective armour, it could have saved itself.  Similarly, for a democracy to survive, it needs to protect itself from excessive powers of the executive branch the government.  Theoretically speaking, not only the executive presidency, but also the other two government arms – the legislature and the judiciary – can be anti-democratic if proper checks and balances are not in place. 

Just as the scorpion, executive presidents are also unable to resist the temptation to undermine democracy. This happened in Sri Lanka in October 2018 and in Tunisia only last week. In between, to varying degrees, executive presidents and prime ministers have acted like scorpions and killed or undermined democracy.  Of course, among the culprits was Donald Trump who cared no two hoots about democratic values which form the very fabric of the US constitution.  He even refused to accept the people’s verdict at the November 2020 presidential election and enticed his hardline followers to launch an insurrection and storm the US Congress when it was about to confirm the election verdict.

While Trump was destroying democracy, it was no surprise that in many nations, populist leaders had no qualms over misusing the executive powers, with some demagogues saying they were doing so to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. In Hungary at the outset of the pandemic, the rightwing populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban removed the constitutional checks and passed legislation to rule by decree for an indefinite period, while silencing the media to boot. 

When Sri Lanka was plunged into a constitutional crisis after the then President Maithripala Sirisena removed Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, appointed opposition Parliamentarian Mahinda Rajapaksa as Prime Minister and then went on to dissolve Parliament, democracy’s defenders had pinned their hopes, rightly so, on the judiciary. The Supreme Court had the courage to cut the then President down to size and tell him tersely that he had violated the Constitution. The court ruled that in terms of the 19th Amendment, he lacked the power to dissolve Parliament at will before parliament completed the mandatory four-and-a-half year period from the day of its first sitting.  

But alas, the hard-won victory for democracy was short lived, when the new Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna government revoked the 19th Amendment which, despite its many shortcomings, stood as the new powerhouse of Lanka’s democracy, and replaced it with the 20th Amendment which removed key constitutional checks and made the office of the executive president all powerful. 

Apart from a murmur of protests from opposition parties and intellectual circles, the people at large, dreaming of Utopia under the new government and the new leadership, refused to see the danger of vesting too much power in the executive branch.  
Constitutional changes democracies worth their salt enact should come with necessary reins to restrain those who hold office when they try to abuse the power the people have vested in them in the belief that they will exercise it with responsibly. 

Tunisia’s political hodgepodge was in many ways similar to the 2015-2019 Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government during which governance was held hostage to the political game of back-stabbing while the leaders paid little attention to national security, national economy and national harmony in what could be described as a criminal desertion of responsibility. 

But the little luck Sri Lankan democracy lovers had in 2018, thanks to the uprightness of the judiciary, is not to be found in Tunisia where there is no constitutional mechanism or a court to challenge the President. Last week, the all-powerful executive president removed the Prime Minister and dissolved parliament in a move condemned by democracy promoters as a constitutional coup or the militarization of the government.  

It was also seen as the last nail on the coffin of the Arab Spring, which began in Tunisia. The democracy wind blew across the Arab world in 2011, giving people hopes that soon they would be freed from the clutches of autocratic rulers, military dictators and monarchs. Alas! The Arab Spring has been turned into a long and dark winter.  
Tunisia stood out as the only success story of the Arab Spring.  But its success was its apparent undoing. Many external forces do not want democracy to take root in the Arab world.  The United States which claims that part of its foreign policy is democracy promotion around the world is a silent observer or in some cases an unseen accomplice when democracy is destroyed by the military or military-backed strongmen.  It is alleged that the US played a behind-the-scenes role in the 2013 Egyptian coup when the democratically elected Brotherhood government after the Arab Spring was overthrown in a bloody counter-revolution financed and supported by some Gulf Arab countries which saw democracy as a curse.  In last week’s Tunisian constitutional coup, too, it is alleged that some Gulf leaders had a hand in it, as they see Islam’s blend with democracy as a dangerous mix that could destabilize the region and pose a threat to their hold on power. 

Yet, democracy survived for ten years in Tunisia until last week President Kais Saied invoked emergency powers, fired the prime minister, and suspended parliament.  The president said he acted in terms of the Constitution’s Article 80 which granted him the authority to take “any measures necessitated by the exceptional circumstances” if the country is in a “state of imminent danger.” 

The exceptional circumstances were the protests in the capital against the technocrat government of Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi.  But the protesters were targeting largely, the Islamic party Ennahda, the largest party in parliament and whose leader was speaker under a power-sharing arrangement.  
Although, the Tunisian government had several ministers from the President’s party, the protesters directed their anger at the Islamist Ennahda for the government’s failure to prop up the economy which was crumbling in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic.  With Tunisia recording the highest per capita death rate from Covid-19 in Africa, income flow from tourism, one of its biggest foreign exchange earners, has come to a standstill. 

Sri Lanka in 2018 and Tunisia last week point to a disturbing trend where those who destroy democracy are allowed to go unpunished and tolerated in politics. The then United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan once famously remarked that countries where governments are toppled in coups should be suspended from UN membership.  It appears that in the absence of a global mechanism to punish or shame coup leaders and democracy killers, democracy’s full bloom will only be an idealist’s dream.