democracy

During China’s imperial age, those deemed guilty of the worst offenses were sometimes sentenced to death in a public square by a brutal form of execution known as lingchi. Soldiers — using sharp blades — would slice away pieces of flesh from the accused until they died. Translated, lingchi means “death by a thousand cuts.”

Maybe democracy does die in darkness, as journalist Bob Woodward often suggests. Or maybe democracy’s demise comes in the light of day, in a public forum, where everyone can bear witness. Sometimes those holding the knives are the oligarchs or elected officials drenched in corruption. And sometimes there’s blood on the hands of the people.

On Saturday, voters in San Antonio — the seventh-largest city in the country — are headed to the polls to decide the first open mayoral race since President Obama’s first term. Or at least some voters will be.

In November 2024, nearly 60% of the 1.3 million registered voters in the county cast a ballot in the general election. However, in the local election held last month, barely 10% showed up to the polls. Before anyone starts throwing shade at San Antonio, in Dallas the turnout was even lower.

Lackluster participation in an “off year” election is not new. However, the mayoral race in San Antonio has increased national interest because the outcome is being viewed as a litmus test for both the strength of the Democrats’ resistance and the public’s appetite for the White House’s policies.

Like other big blue cities nestled in legislatively red states, San Antonio’s progressive policies have been under constant assault from the governor’s mansion. And with neither the progressive candidate, Gina Ortiz Jones, or her MAGA-leaning opponent, Rolando Pablos, eclipsing 50% of the vote in May, the runoff has drawn more than $1 million in campaign spending from outside conservative groups looking to flip the traditionally blue stronghold.

The outcome could provide a possible glimpse into the 2026 mayoral race in Los Angeles, should the formerly Republican Rick Caruso decide to run against Mayor Karen Bass, a Democrat. When the two faced off in 2022, around 44% of the city’s registered voters went to the polls. Caruso lost by less than 90,000 votes in a city with 2.1 million registered voters — most of whom didn’t submit a ballot.

It is rather astonishing how little we actually participate in democracy, given the amount of tax dollars we have spent trying to convince other nations that our government system is the best on the planet. Capitulating to President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of mass voter fraud, many local conservative elected officials have tried to ram through a litany of “voter integrity” policies under the guise of protecting democracy. However, democracy is not a delicate flower in need of protection. It’s a muscle in need of exercise.

“Some people find voting to be a chore,” Michele Carew, the elections administrator for Bexar County — which includes San Antonio — told me. “We need to make voting easier and quite frankly, fun. And we need to get those who don’t feel like their vote counts to see that it does. That means getting out and talking to people in our neighborhood, in our churches, in our grocery stores … about when elections are coming up and what’s at stake locally.”

Carew said that the added outside interest in the city’s election has driven up early voting a tick and that she expects to see roughly a 15% turnout, which is an increase over previous years. It could be worse. The city once elected a mayor with 7% turnout back in 2013. Carew also expressed concern about outside influence on local governing.

“One of the first times I saw these nonpartisan races become more political was in 2020, and so as time goes by it’s gotten even more so. I would like to think once the candidate is elected mayor they remain nonpartisan and do what’s best for the city and not their party.”

In 2024, a presidential election year when you’d expect the highest turnout, 1 in 3 registered voters across this country — roughly 20 million people — took a look around and said, “Nah, I’m good.” Or something like that.

The highest turnout was in Washington, D.C., where nearly 80% showed up. Too bad it’s not a state. Among the lowest turnout rates? Texas — which has the second-greatest number of voters, behind only California.

And therein lies the problem with trying to extrapolate national trends from local elections. Maybe Ortiz Jones will win in San Antonio this weekend. Maybe Caruso will win in L.A. next year. None of this tells us how the vast majority of Americans are really feeling.

Sure, it’s good fodder to debate around the table or on cable news shows, but ultimately the sample size of a mayoral election belies any claims about a result’s meaning. Turnout during an off year is just too low.

One thing we know for certain is most voters in America exercise their right to vote only once every four years. Oligarchs and corrupt officials are not great, but it’s hard for democracy to stay healthy and strong if that’s all the exercise it’s getting.

@LZGranderson

From Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, US wars left not freedom, but ruin. In a recent book, co-authors Noam Chomsky and Nathan Robinson expose how American elites sell violence as virtue, using the myth of democracy to justify endless war.

Last week, Ugandan lawyer Agather Atuhaire was finally set free five days after she was detained by the Tanzanian police for unclear reasons. She was unceremoniously dumped at the Mutukula border crossing between the two countries.

Details of Atuhaire’s condition remain unclear, but a statement from the organisation she works with as well as Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi, who was detained with her, alleged that she was tortured. He himself showed signs of physical abuse after he was also dumped at the Kenya-Tanzania border a day earlier.

For East Africans, Atuhaire and Mwangi’s ordeal has been a painful reminder of just how far democracy in the region has retreated. People organising to resist state excesses have been increasingly facing structural and physical violence with little space for redress.

Mwangi and Atuhaire were among a small group of regional activists and political figures who flew into Tanzania to show solidarity with Tundu Lissu, the leader of the Tanzanian opposition. Lissu is facing several charges, the most grievous among them treason, for comments he allegedly made at a political rally.

But Lissu is not alone in the region in facing reprisals for political action. In neighbouring Uganda, leader of the opposition Kizza Besigye is facing the same charges, based on the same idea that organising and leading opposition against an entrenched political power amounts to treason.

Meanwhile, in Kenya, the aftermath of the 2024 anti-finance bill protests is haunting the country. In the absence of a well organised political opposition, which is stymied by frenetic deal-making and horse-trading, protesters and youth activists have become the country’s unofficial political opposition.

The youth have borne the brunt of political violence during last year’s protests, which killed at least 82 people. Kidnappings and abductions of protesters spiked after the demonstrations, and activist groups alleged that some people remain unaccounted for despite President William Ruto’s assertion to the contrary.

In Burundi, people continue to live under the shadow of police excesses and in fear of the possibility of war with its expansionist neighbours.

In Rwanda, several opposition figures who tried to run against President Paul Kagame were jailed on various charges. The neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo is perennially caught between war and political crisis.

So how did we get to this state of affairs? The simplest answer is that we allowed ourselves to conflate elections with democracy, and the malicious intentions of those who wield power took advantage of that faith. The reality of building robust democratic systems is far more complicated than lining up to vote every four or five years, and real democracy requires round the clock vigilance.

A meaningful democracy requires robust local government, transparent political parties as well as institutional accountability and participation, all of which have been on the retreat in the region in the past two decades.

Power has remained highly centralised in the executive, enabled by the capitulation of legislatures and the “naomba serekali” (“I am requesting of the government”) approach to politics.

Parliaments are empowered by the legitimacy of a popular vote, but they repeatedly submit to the executive. Proof of this can be easily found in the experience of women trying to run for office in the region.

As outlined in a 2018 volume on the Kenyan election that I co-edited, Where Women Are: Gender and the 2017 Kenyan General Election, the weakness begins within political parties, in which candidates must kowtow to a kingpin to gain permission to appear on the ballot. Those who do not are often locked out from competitive electoral cycles. As a result, save for constitutional quotas, women’s participation in electoral politics has declined – a canary in the coalmine of shrinking democratic space.

Meanwhile, parties have mastered the art of managing gender optics as a substitute for real change, reducing debates about democracy to the periodic performance of voting. Thus, Samia Suluhu’s presidency in Tanzania is not a sign of improving democracy but rather that of a political machine that picked the least contentious candidate who would allow the ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi, to continue managing the country. Similarly, the dominance of women in Rwanda’s parliament is not in itself indicative of progress for women but of the ability of the ruling party to select candidates who are less likely to push back.

Once these candidates are laundered through the political party machine, they enter the legislature more beholden to their political kingpin than to voters. And this is the case whether the kingpin is in government or in the opposition.

In Kenya, opposition candidates like Edwin Sifuna, who vociferously defended the rights of protesters during the June 2024 protests, have become tongue-tied in 2025 because their party kingpin has since struck a deal with Ruto and blind obeisance is the only guaranteed pathway to power in this system.

In Uganda, politicians are bought off with state cars and loans, and in Tanzania, they are silenced by arrests, detentions and disappearances of critics of the state. The net effect is that elections become a performance whose actual impact diminishes rapidly over time.

A quick scan of global politics will affirm that this is not a uniquely East African problem. The same crisis is taking shape in the United States, particularly after the evisceration of the Republican Party by Tea Party politics and of the Democratic Party by careerist politicians.

But the events of the last week show that for East Africa, an extra layer of risk exists because of the unquestioning and blind loyalty of security services to the whims of the state – something the current US administration seeks to build into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

The long-term solution to this state of affairs is for ordinary people to become more engaged in localised democratic practices, changing the quality of people who rise up the ranks in politics. Of course, this can be difficult when people are merely trying to survive a hostile political and economic climate, but in the long term, it creates new entry points for civic engagement.

Democracy is strengthened when more people participate in the governance of civic institutions like schools, hospitals, trade unions, cooperatives, neighbourhood associations, and even sports and social clubs – in processes that they can immediately connect to their quality of life.

Elections then become the culmination of four or five years of regular exercises of democracy, not a separate process that floats above the reality of people’s lives.

In parallel, the onus is on the legislators of East Africa to find their teeth and their purpose. Their job is not political survival or the pursuit of political careers. Their job is to defend the people who elected them, to rein in the excesses of the executive and to defend the integrity of the constitution.

Meanwhile, we, the people, should all heed the call of Nigerian public intellectual Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem: “Don’t agonise, organise,” and seek to rebuild democracy in East Africa from the ground up.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

CANNES, France — “The sun is my mortal enemy,” Ari Aster says, squinting as he sits on the sixth-floor rooftop terrace of Cannes’ Palais des Festivals, where most of the screenings happen. It’s an especially bright afternoon and we take refuge in the shade.

Aster, the 38-year-old filmmaker of “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” wears a olive-colored suit and baseball cap. He’s already a household name among horror fans and A24’s discerning audiences, but the director is competing at Cannes for the first time with “Eddington,” a paranoid thriller set in a New Mexican town riven by pandemic anxieties. Like a modern-day western, the sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) spars with the mayor (Pedro Pascal) in tense showdowns while protests over the murder of George Floyd flare on street corners. Too many people cough without their masks on. Conspiracy nuts, mysterious drones and jurisdictional tensions shift the film into something more Pynchonesque and surreal.

In advance of the movie’s July 18 release, “Eddington” has become a proper flash point at Cannes, dividing opinion starkly. Like Aster’s prior feature, 2023’s “Beau Is Afraid,” it continues his expansion into wider psychological territory, signaling a heretofore unexpressed political dimension spurred by recent events, as well as an impulse to explore a different kind of American fear. We sat down with him on Sunday to discuss the movie and its reception.

I remember what it was like in 2018 at Sundance with “Hereditary” and being a part of that first midnight audience where it felt like something special was happening. How does this time feel compared to that?

It feels the same. It’s just nerve-wracking and you feel totally vulnerable and exposed. But it’s exciting. It’s always been a dream to premiere a film in Cannes.

Have you ever been to Cannes before?

No.

So this must feel like living out that dream. How do you think it went on Friday?

I don’t know. How do you feel it went? [Laughs]

I knew you were going to turn it around.

That’s what everybody asks me. Everybody comes up saying [makes a pity face], “How are you feeling? How do you think it went?” And it’s like, I am the least objective person here. I made the film.

I know you’ve heard about those legendary Cannes premieres where audiences have extreme reactions and it feels like the debut of “The Rite of Spring.” Some people are loving it, some people are hating it. Those are the best ones, aren’t they?

Oh, yeah. But again, I don’t really have a picture of what the response is.

Do you read your reviews?

I’ve been staying away while I do press and talk to people. So I can speak to the film.

Makes sense. I felt great love in the room for Joaquin Phoenix, who was rubbing your shoulder during the ovation. Have you talked to the cast and how they think it went, or were they just having a good time?

I think that they’re all really proud of the film. That’s what I know and it’s been nice to be here with them.

Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Pedro Pascal in the movie “Eddington.”

(A24)

In the context of your four features, “Hereditary,” “Midsommar,” “Beau Is Afraid” and now “Eddington,” how easy was “Eddington” to make?

They’re all hard. We’re always trying to stretch our resources as far as they can go, and so they’ve all been just about equally difficult, in different ways.

Is it fair to say that your films have changed since “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” and now they’re more accommodating of a larger swath of sociopolitical material?

I am just following my impulses so I’m not thinking in that way. There’s very little strategy going on. It’s just: What am I interested in? And when I started writing, because I was in a real state of fear and anxiety about what was happening in the country and what was happening in the world, and I wanted to make a film about what it was feeling like.

This was circa what, 2020?

It was in June 2020 that I started writing it. I wanted to make a film about what it feels like to live in a world where nobody agrees about what is happening.

You mean no one agrees what is happening in the sense that we can’t even agree on the facts?

Yes. There’s this social force that has been at the center of mass liberal democracies for a very long time, which is this agreed-upon version of what is real. And of course, we could all argue and have our own opinions, but we all fundamentally agreed about what we were arguing about. And that is something that has been going away. It’s been happening for the last 20 something years. But COVID, for me, felt like when the last link was cut, this old idea of democracy, that it could be sort of a countervailing force against power, tech, finance. That’s gone now completely.

And at that moment it felt like I was kind of in a panic about it. I’m sure that I am probably not alone. And so I wanted to make a film about the environment, not about me. The film is very much about the gulf between politics and policy. Politics is public relations. Policy is things that are actually happening. Real things are happening very quickly, moving very quickly.

I think of “Eddington” as very much a horror film. It’s the horror of free-floating political anxiety. That’s what’s scaring you right now. And we don’t have any kind of control over it.

We have no control and we feel totally powerless and we’re being led by people who do not believe in the future. So we’re living in an atmosphere of total despair.

During the lockdown, I was just sitting on my phone doom-scrolling. Is that what you were doing?

Of course. There was a lot of great energy behind the internet, this idea of: It’s going to bring people together, it’s going to connect them. But of course then finance got involved, as it always does, and whatever that was curdled and was put on another track. It used to be something we went to. You went to your computer at home, you would maybe go to your email. Everything took forever to load. And then with these phones, we began living in cyberspace, so we are living in the internet.

It’s owned us, it’s consumed us and we don’t see it. The really insidious thing about our culture and about this moment is that it’s scary and it’s dangerous and it’s catastrophic and it’s absurd and ridiculous and stupid and impossible to take seriously.

Did that “ridiculous and stupid” part lead you aesthetically to make something that was an extremely dark comedy? I think “Eddington” sometimes plays like a comedy.

Well, I mean there’s something farcical going on. I wanted to make a good western too, and westerns are about the country and the mythology of America and the romance of America. They’re very sentimental. I’m interested in the tension between the idealism of America and the reality of it.

You have your western elements in there, your Gunther’s Pistol Palace and a heavily armed endgame that often recalls “No Country for Old Men.”

You’ve got Joe, who’s a sheriff, who loves his wife and cares about his community. And he’s 50 years old, so he grew up with those ’90s action movies and, at the end, he gets to live through one.

Let’s step backward for a second about where you were and what you were doing around the time you started writing this. You were finishing up “Beau Is Afraid,” right? What was your life like then? You were freaking out and watching the news and starting to write a script. What was that process like for you?

I was New Mexico at the time. I was living in New York in a tiny apartment, but then I had to come back to New Mexico. There was a COVID scare in my family and I wanted to be near family. I was there for a couple months and just wanted to make a film about what the world felt like, what the country felt like.

Were you worried about your own health and safety during that time?

Of course. I’m a hyper-neurotic Jew. I’m always worried about my health.

And also the breakdown of truth. What were the reactions when you first started sharing your script with the people who ended up in your cast? What was Joaquin’s reaction like?

I just remember that he really took to the character and loved Joe and wanted to play him, and that was exciting to me. I loved working with him on “Beau” and I gave him the script hoping that he would want to do it. They all responded really quickly and jumped on. There was just a general excitement and a feeling for the project. I had a friendship with Emily [Emma Stone, whom Aster calls by her birth name] already and now we’re all friends. I really love them as actors and as people. It was a pretty fluid, nice process.

I haven’t seen many significant movies expressly about the pandemic yet. Did it feel like you were breaking new ground?

I don’t think that way, but I was wanting to see some reflection on what was happening.

Even in the seven years since “Hereditary,” do you feel like the business has changed?

Yeah, it is changing. I mean, everything feels like it’s changing. I think about [Marshall] McLuhan and how we’re in a stage right now where we’re moving from one medium to another. The internet has been the prominent, prevailing, dominant medium, and that’s changed the landscape of everything, and we’re moving towards something new. We don’t know what’s coming with AI. It’s also why we’re so nostalgic now about film and 70mm presentations.

Do you ever feel like you got into this business at the last-possible minute?

Definitely. I feel very fortunate that I’m able to make the films I want to make and I feel lucky to have been able to make this film.

There’s a lot of room in “Eddington” for any kind of a viewer to find a mirror of themselves and also be challenged. It doesn’t preach to the converted. Was that an intent of yours?

[Long pause] Sorry, I’m just thinking. I’m just starting to talk about the film. I guess I’m trying to make a film about how we’re all actually in the same situation and how similar we are. Which may be hard to see and I’m not a sociologist. But it was important to me to make a film about the environment.

I was asked recently, Do you have any hope? And I think the answer to that is that I do have hope, but I don’t have confidence.

It’s easy to be cynical.

But I do see that if there is any hope, we have to reengage with each other. And for me, it was important to not judge any of these characters. I’m not judging them. I’m not trying to judge them.

Ari Aster, left, and Pedro Pascal on the set of “Eddington.”

(Richard Foreman)

I love that you have a partner in A24 that is basically letting you go where you need to go as an artist.

They’ve been very supportive. It’s great because I’ve been able to make these films without compromise.

Do you have an idea for your next one?

I’ve got a few ideas. I’m deciding between three.

You can’t give me a taste of anything?

Not yet, no. They’re all different genres and I’m trying to decide what’s right.

Let’s hope we survive to that point. How are you personally, apart from movies?

I’m very worried. I’m very worried and I am really sad about where things are. And otherwise there needs to be another idea. Something new has to happen.

You mean like a new political paradigm or something?

Yeah. The system we’re in is a response to the last system that failed. And the only answer, the only alternative I’m hearing is to go back to that old system. I’ll just say even just the idea of a collective is just a harder thing to imagine. How can that happen? How do we ever come together? Can there be any sort of countervailing force to power? I feel increasingly powerless and impotent. And despairing.

Ari, it’s a beautiful day. It’s hard to be completely cynical about the world when you’re at Cannes and it’s sunny. Even in just 24 hours, “Eddington” has become a conversation film, debated and discussed. Doesn’t it thrill you that you have one of those kind of movies?

That’s what this is supposed to be. And you want people to be talking about it and arguing about it. And I hope it is something that you have to wrestle with and think about.

On May 12, two days after the announcement of a ceasefire between India and Pakistan, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi finally addressed the nation. He stated that the Indian army had only “paused” military action and Operation Sindoor, launched in the aftermath of the April 22 massacre in Pahalgam to target “terrorist hideouts”, had not ended.

“Now, Operation Sindoor is India’s policy against terrorism. Operation Sindoor has carved out a new benchmark in our fight against terrorism and has set up a new parameter and new normal,” he said.

Modi’s speech was clearly not meant to reassure the Indian people that the government can guarantee their safety or security and is seeking peace and stability. Instead, it was meant to warn that the country is now in a permanent warlike situation.

This new state of affairs has been called not to secure the national interest but to satisfy Modi’s nationalist support base, which was bewildered and disappointed with the announcement of the ceasefire by United States President Donald Trump. The detrimental impact that this new militarised normal will have on Indian democracy is clearly a price worth paying, according to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The truth is, the political establishment unwittingly put itself in a difficult position when it decided to capitalise politically on the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack in India-administered Kashmir and whip up war fervour.

While victims of the attack like Himanshi Narwal, who survived but lost her husband, navy officer Vinay Narwal, called for peace and warned against the targeting of Muslims and Kashmiris, the BJP called for revenge and embraced anti-Muslim rhetoric.

As a ruling party, it did not feel the need to take responsibility for failing to prevent the attack or explain the carelessness in securing tourist destinations. It immediately converted this act of killing into an act of war against India.

Actions followed the hate rhetoric swiftly. Muslims and Kashmiris were attacked in several parts of India, and arrests were made of those criticising the Indian government. In Kashmir, nine houses were blasted immediately as punishment of those who had any link with “terrorists”, and thousands were detained or arrested. People with Pakistani passports were deported, and families were broken.

Then, Operation Sindoor was announced. The Indian army’s targeting of Pakistani sites was accompanied by frenzied calls from the mainstream media for the complete obliteration of Pakistan. Major TV platforms – entirely falsely – declared the Karachi port had been destroyed and the Indian army had breached the border.

The war cries and fake news emerging from the TV studios and the frantic messaging from the IT cells of the BJP led its supporters to believe that a decisive battle against Pakistan had been launched and its fall was imminent.

In parallel, critical voices were swiftly silenced. The Indian government requested the blocking of 8,000 accounts from the social media platform X, including those of BBC Urdu, Outlook India, Maktoob Media, veteran journalist Anuradha Bhasin and political content creator Arpit Sharma.

Just when war fever had gripped the BJP’s support base, the sudden announcement of a ceasefire by the US caught them by surprise. The truce was seen as a retreat and an admission of weakness.

Some of the BJP’s online supporters turned on the foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, who had declared the ceasefire as the representative of the government of India. He was viciously attacked, and his timeline was flooded with abusive and violent messages, calling him a traitor and coward. His daughter also faced abuse.

The trolling was so severe that Misri had to lock his social media accounts. Interestingly, but unsurprisingly, we did not hear about the blocking of any social media accounts trolling him or any action by the police against them. There was no action to protect Narwal either after she faced abuse and humiliation by the same crowd for daring to call for peace.

Meanwhile, the Association for Protection of Civil Rights, which focuses on rights violations in marginalised communities, has released a report saying 184 hate crimes against Muslims – including murder, assault, vandalism, hate speech, threats, intimidation and harassment – have been reported from different parts of India since April 22.

On Saturday, Misri claimed that India was a democracy that allowed criticism of the government. But the experience of critics raising questions about the objective and efficacy of Operation Sindoor has been bitter.

Criticism of government requires parliamentary deliberation. But the government has been ignoring calls by opposition parties to convene the parliament, which means stalling democratic dialogue.

Now that the prime minister has announced the operation has not ended, total loyalty from the Indian people will be demanded. Opposition parties would feel compelled to suspend all questions to the government. Muslims would feel a burden to prove their allegiance to the nation. The government will happily blame a dire economic situation that is of its doing on the war. There will be freedom of speech, but only for those who speak in favour of the BJP.

Democracy in India thus remains in suspended animation as the country now faces a permanent enemy and a permanent war.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.