Listed as a “flawed democracy,” The Economist notes that El Salvador fell from 6.15 to 5.9 in 77th place, out of a list of 167 countries. It is the only Latin American country that was degraded from one regime to another.
The fragility of democracy in El Salvador is under the magnifying glass of the world. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index report recently exposed the worrying situation.
The document details that El Salvador had a notorious inclination towards authoritarianism during 2020. In a section entitled “Authoritarianism in El Salvador: a potential dictator?” points out that the president, Nayib Bukele, has seemed to ignore the controls and balances of his government, when in April 2020 he disobeyed rulings of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice, which called for respect for fundamental rights in the measures of quarantine, before the arrests to circulate in the streets.
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The Economist report also mentions that it “surrounded the Legislative Assembly of military and police to pressure the legislature to approve a $ 100 million loan.”
Listed as a “flawed democracy,” The Economist notes that El Salvador fell from 6.15 to 5.9 in 77th place, out of a list of 167 countries. It is the only Latin American country that was degraded from one regime to another.
Freedoms are set to recede in 2020 due to anti-pandemic measures
The average overall Democracy Index score will fall from 5.44 to 2019 to 5.37 in 2020, on a scale of 0 to 10. This is the worst score since 2006, since the Democracy Index is assessed. In Latin America the index fell for the fifth consecutive year from 6.13 to 6.09.
Democratic freedoms have receded in nearly 70 percent of the world’s countries by 2020 due to restrictions caused by the fight against the pandemic, according to a study by British group The Economist published on Wednesday.
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“The coronavirus pandemic has caused a huge setback in democratic freedoms, bringing the index’s average marker to historic lows,” according to this study published by the British weekly’s research unit.
The phenomenon is global and highly pronounced in the autocratic regimes of Africa or the Middle East, but the “suppression of individual freedoms in advanced democracies was the most striking of 2020,” he points out.
“The voluntary abandonment of fundamental freedoms by millions of people was perhaps one of the most notorious events of this extraordinary year (…) but we cannot conclude that the high level of acceptance of the containment measures it means people take value away from freedom, ”said Joan Hoey, head of the study.
“They simply judged, on the basis of evidence (…), that avoiding catastrophic deaths justified a temporary loss of liberty,” he said.
Above 8, countries are considered “full-fledged democracies.” This category groups the top 23 countries. The best is Norway with an index of 9.81, but also include Switzerland or Canada. France, on the other hand, ranks 24th.
The research unit of the British group The Economist calculates the democracy index every year. It is calculated on the basis of 10 according to 60 criteria, grouped into five categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, government functioning, political participation and political culture.
The overall result is 5.37, “the worst global average since the index was created in 2006.” The biggest drop was recorded in Mali and Taiwan was the one that rose the most.
The worst-ranked country in 2020 is North Korea, with a democracy index of 1.08, ranked among the “authoritarian regimes”.