Is democracy at risk of extinction?
According to a survey by Open society foundations, more than a third of 18-35 year olds favour a military regime or an authoritarian leader. How did it come to this?
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00:00 Have we lost faith in democracy? Open Society Foundation surveyed more than 36,000 people
00:07 in 30 countries recently, with potentially surprising results. While faith in democracy
00:14 is high, 18 to 35-year-olds are the most skeptical about its effectiveness. 42 percent of them
00:21 believe that a military regime is a good way to govern a country, and 35 percent favor
00:27 having a strong leader who does away with elections and parliament.
00:33 I think it's a combination of factors. I think you have a generation that has experienced
00:37 a series of shocks - economic, COVID, climate change - and there's plenty of evidence that
00:44 authoritarian states didn't do well in terms of navigating this crisis, but neither did
00:52 democracies. So I think that's a challenge. When you've grown up in an age of instability,
00:57 of crisis, you have very little faith in politicians. So I think that translates into skepticism
01:04 of the system as a whole.
01:07 Where does this general mistrust come from?
01:12 I think people, young people, but people in general, they want democracy to work. They're
01:18 very positive about things such as human rights. They care about these values. I think the
01:24 problem is they're not seeing their current leaders delivering in the way that they really
01:29 care about. So I think here is where we need to see the progress and the restoration of
01:34 trust, so that you have the expectation that people have of the system that they care about
01:41 actually delivering their needs.
01:45 So is democracy really in danger of dying out?
01:52 The trend is towards greater freedom. Over the long term, when you really start looking
01:59 at I think the things people care about personally, which include human rights, those things are
02:19 so deeply ingrained, even in countries that have more authoritarian governments, you just
02:25 cannot see that fading away.
02:27 (whooshing)