The US election is no longer just Biden vs Trump – democracy itself is on the ballot

This year was always going to be notable for the sheer breadth and scale of its democratic elections. During 2024, more people are expected to vote in more (relatively) free and fair elections than ever.

Next week, the European parliament’s 400 million eligible voters will have the option to go to the polls, followed soon after by around 46 million Britons, who will choose whether or not the Conservatives deserve another term in office (it looks like not).

This weekend will bring the results of elections in India for the Lok Sabah (969 million eligible voters in the world’s largest democracy), and South Africa, with its 28 million registered voters.

While no democracy is flawless, and South Africa and India have both had their problems (as have the UK and the EU), it is nothing but encouraging that 30 years after the first free, multiracial elections in South Africa, there will be another peaceful transition, from majority rule by the ANC to some other arrangement. Narendra Modi in India – still a relatively young democracy at 75 years – fears no such loss of power, but even with his nationalistic, authoritarian tendencies, elections in that country have been relatively orderly.

Contrast these positive images of democracy in action with the situation in what is arguably the world’s oldest major democratic state, the United States of America. There, as is all too painfully obvious, a man with a roughly even chance of becoming the next president stands as a convicted felon, found guilty on 34 charges relating to campaign finance.

More outrageous even than that, Donald Trump has rejected not just the verdict unanimously returned by the jurors, but the integrity of the judge and the legitimacy of the “rigged” court. Trump’s deranged remarks were crowned by his absurd and unsubstantiated allegation that the trial was directed by the White House and the district attorney, and that they were “backed” by none other than George Soros, the default villain in many a conspiracy theory.

Nor are Trump’s legal battles over. He has to find $83m (£65m) to settle the E Jean Carroll libel case, and must also face three more sets of serious charges, relating to the subversion of the 2020 election, unlawful possession of classified state papers, and incitement to insurrection in the infamous 6 January riot. These are, of course, only the most egregious of the former President Trump’s assaults on the constitution and democratic norms, which took place both during and after his time in office.

Such is the man now being presented by the Republican Party to America’s some 161 million registered voters. Somehow, Trump has managed to create a cult of personality, more familiarly known as Maga, which has captured that venerable institution and enslaved virtually all of its other leaders, at least to some extent.

It is an extraordinary spectacle in a nation that has endured (and survived) civil war, presidential impeachments, political riots, racial violence, domestic terrorism, Watergate, numerous other scandals, and many bitterly contested elections.

America is not, as Trump once luridly called it, “a lawless, open-borders, crime-ridden, filthy, communist nightmare”. It is, rather, the world’s supreme military power, a global technological and economic powerhouse, and richer than it has ever been; it has a robust free press, an independent judiciary, and a well-regulated voting system supervised by honourable officials (whose honesty was rarely questioned before Trump lumbered onto the scene and, as will be alleged in the coming trials, tried to steal the 2020 election).

It is a deeply perplexing puzzle that countries such as South Africa and India, with all the fundamental challenges they face, can manage to elect a government without the trauma and sense of impending doom currently afflicting the United States of America. Trump himself has conjured up the appalling vista of a second civil war if he is denied office in November, and, only half-jokingly, proposed that he be made dictator. Everything he did when he was president gives cause for concern about the future, as does his self-proclaimed desire since the end of his tenure to use a further term in office to enact “retribution” against his opponents.

In recent months, he has sought to introduce a new doctrine to the American constitution – complete, unlimited and indefinite presidential immunity. He would very much like to place himself above the law. Never before has a wannabe dictator signalled their intentions with such clarity as has Trump. He, a man with pronounced fascist tendencies, said, in a characteristically rambling diatribe at Trump Tower, that America is a “fascist state” and that Joe Biden is a “Manchurian candidate”, presumably meaning an agent of the Russians (which is also ironic, given Trump’s curious friendship with Vladimir Putin).

Mr Biden says the only way to stop Trump is by voting in the appropriate way on 5 November. He is right about that, but it is not just Biden vs Trump that will be on the ballot paper: it will be democracy itself.

Under Trump, America will gradually sink towards the kind of semi-democratic authoritarianism suffered by the populations of countries such as Turkey, Hong Kong, and Hungary. We know this because he has said as much, and we have the record of his previous term to examine. This November, nothing less is at stake than the future of the United States as a fully free democratic state.