Raul Garcia, Staff Writer

Last week Brazil’s Parliament elected Jair Bolsonaro, a supporter of Brazil’s 1980’s police state. Bolsonaro is a man often described as a fascist. He is a figure who supports the use of torture and has advocated that police kill more often. Yet, Bolsonaro has convinced the people of Brazil to elect him despite his troubling rhetoric and the support of human rights violations. Whether Bolsonaro’s plans to be ‘tough’ on crime prove to be effective is yet to be seen.

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However, Jair Bolsonaro is not the only figure that has the potential to turn a democracy into an Autocratic state.  All around the world, there is one common trait democracy is beginning to decline.

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In Europe, many countries have slowly become less democratic. Poland has overthrown and taken control of independent political institutes; their Supreme Court justices were removed by political partisans and nationalist. This act, although illegal, was ignored by the new parliament and the majority party that benefited from this. The majority party, Law and Justice (PIS) also fired thousands of civil servants and military officers. The PIS also began fining news outlets who produced negative coverage of the parliament. The PIS has been able to gain popular support for their illegal actions by pushing a Nationalist agenda against the European Union and the influx of Middle Eastern Immigrants.

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Similar stories have come risen in Hungary, where the majority party, a nationalist party, has attempted to censor political advertisements, dissidents. The majority party has also used a media to run smear campaigns on any opposition movement that tries to create a party. In Hungary, people have pushed anti-Semitic politics.  In Russia, the country is run by the Autocratic Vladimir Putin, who has manipulated the Russian constitution to change the number of his terms. Putin has also eliminated the possibility of any political opposition having enough support to create political parties by raising the electoral threshold. Russia has also used false information and fake news to manipulate the reality of his actions, ranging from the hostile occupation of Crimea, the subjugation of the people of Chechnya, and the mass persecution of LGBT people through the Russian Federation.

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In Asia, in Myanmar, the Rohingya have been belittled and dehumanized as murders and rapist to the point that the Myanmar government has attempted to justify the genocide of the Rohingya. China president, Xi Jinping has now declared himself president for life in China.

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The people of the free world, young and old, must confront the reality that the ideology that led nationalist and autocrats to bloody the history of the last millennium still exist. The same ideas and people that allowed Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini exist today. People will still take advantage of economic hardship to turn people against each other. Today, this fascist demagoguery has led to the deaths of people, the consolidation of power for a few political elites, the subversion of speech by eliminating truth, and it has even led people to murder in political acts of violence and hate crimes. People need to become of vocal in the opposition of Nationalism and Authoritarian regimes; if we allow ourselves to be compliant to these radical political shifts, then political and ethnic violence is sure to follow in the years to come.