Over the past three years, the world’s oldest democracy has been tested in ways not seen in decades

Over the past three years, the world’s oldest democracy has been tested in ways not seen in decades.

A sitting president tried to overturn an election and his supporters stormed the Capitol to stop the winner from taking power. Supporters of that attack launched a campaign against local election offices, chasing out veteran administrators and pushing conservative states to pass new laws making it harder to vote.

At the same time, the past three years proved that American democracy was resilient.

Former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results failed, blocked by the constitutional system’s checks and balances, and he now faces both federal and state charges for those efforts. Then the voters stepped in. In every presidential battleground state, they rejected all candidates who supported Trump’s stolen election lies and were running for statewide offices that had some oversight of elections.

The election infrastructure in the country performed well, with only scattered disruptions during the 2022 midterms. New voting laws, many of which are technical and incremental, had little discernable impact on actual voting.

  • MicroWave@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    5·
    11 months ago

    Depends on the criteria:

    If you’re looking for the very first instance of democracy, credit is often attributed to Ancient Athens. It’s there the term originated, based on the Greek words demos (“common people”) and kratos (“strength”). In the 6th century BC, the city-state allowed all landowners to speak at the legislative assembly, blazing a path that would be followed by democracies in the future.

    However, Ancient Athens wasn’t really a country in the modern sense. It’s also not around anymore, so that certainly disqualifies the oldest continuous democratic country today.

    …

    Democracies also have to be continuous in order to count. Although France has important democratic origins, the country is currently on its fifth republic since the French Revolution, thanks to Napoleon, Vichy France, and other instances where things went sideways.

    …

    Using this specific criteria, there is only one country with continuous democracy for more than 200 years (The United States), and fourteen countries with democracies older than a century.

    https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/countries-are-the-worlds-oldest-democracies/