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Freedom House

2. Marginalizing the opposition: As noted above,
authoritarian leaders use their media power to
paint critics as knaves or buffoons. Especially
through television coverage, opposition figures
are presented as clownish, effeminate, shady,
elitist, or enslaved by foreign interests. The mes-
sage is pounded home day after day, until the
image of the opposition as small and unfit to
rule is fixed in the public’s mind.

3. Tolerating the pseudo-opposition: Having jailed,
exiled, or silenced potentially competitive oppo-
sition figures, authoritarians tolerate nominal op-
position parties that are effectively controlled by
the regime. These groups have accepted the su-
premacy of the incumbent leadership and settled
into their roles in a stage-managed democracy.

4. Criminalizing protest: The crippling of formal
opposition parties leads many voters to chan-
nel their dissent into loosely organized civic
activism, often relying on protests to mobilize
support and reach the broader public despite
state control of the media. Authoritarian govern-
ments have responded by adopting harsher laws
on public assembly, enabling them to jail pro-
test leaders and even ordinary participants for
vaguely defined offenses like disturbing public
order and gathering without a permit. Protesters
can also be imprisoned on trumped-up charges,
such as assaulting a police officer or possessing
a weapon. This discourages others from joining
the civic movements and prevents them from
growing into organized political forces.

5. Discarding term limits: Term limits designed
to prevent the concentration of power in one
individual have been rolled back, circumvented,
or removed altogether in Venezuela, Nicaragua,
Bolivia, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and many
other countries over the past 15 years.¹⁰ Endless
incumbency denies opposition forces an oppor-
tunity to win over both voters and elements of
the ruling establishment that may be ready for
new leadership. It also promotes personal loy-
alty at the expense of public service, stunts the
development of possible successors, reinforces
the impression that only the current leader is fit
to govern, and feeds a self-perpetuating fear of
political change.

Returning to old habits
While modern authoritarian regimes have generally
maintained some illusion of pluralism as one of their
main concessions to the post–Cold War international or-
der, a number of governments have been less attentive
to this priority, drifting back toward the electoral tactics,
and lopsided results, of 20th-century dictatorships.

In Belarus, the election of just two members of the
opposition to the rubber-stamp parliament in 2016 was
actually regarded as a step forward from the 2004, 2008,
and 2012 balloting, in which no opposition candidates
won seats. Lukashenka, in power since 1994, was
accused of directing an assassination squad prior to the
2001 presidential election. Four politicians and journal-
ists who had been critical of the incumbent disappeared
prior to the vote. After Lukashenka won another term in
a deeply flawed 2010 election, the authorities arrested
over 700 protesters, including seven of the nine opposi-
tion presidential candidates. The regime later sentenced
three of the former candidates to prison terms.¹¹

Ethiopian opposition members were beaten and arrest-
ed during the 2015 electoral campaign. The Semayawi
Party reported that more than 50 of its members were
arrested ahead of the polls, and nearly half of Semay-
awi candidates were deregistered on administrative
grounds. The ruling EPRDF and its allies took all 547
seats in the lower house. The 2010 elections were also
tightly controlled, with local officials or neighborhood
militia going door to door and verifying that residents
had registered as members of the EPRDF. Voters were
threatened with the loss of their jobs, homes, or gov-
ernment services if they did not turn out for the party.
The most charismatic opposition figure, the leader of
the Unity and Justice Party, Birtukan Mideksa, re-
mained in prison during the election, in which opposi-
tion candidates took only two seats.¹²

The possible motivations for retrograde electoral abus-
es vary from country to country, but authoritarians
may feel emboldened to drop their quasi-democratic
camouflage due to the lack of diplomatic repercus-
sions for such actions. The European Union and the
United States have criticized Belarus as "Europe’s last
dictatorship," but they always seem willing to give Lu-
kashenka another chance to improve relations based
on the thinnest hopes of reform. Democratic powers
have treated Ethiopia as a counterterrorism ally and a
model of rapid economic development, granting it bil-
lions of dollars in foreign assistance.

Elections and democratic renewal
Whether through blatant repression or less obvious
methods, modern authoritarians seek to control the

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