How Free Is the “Free World”?

Welcome to today’s Morning Brief, where we’re looking at the health of global democracy, Georgia’s controversial “Russian law,” and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s invitation to U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. 

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In his State of the Union address one month ago, U.S. President Joe Biden hailed the resilience of global democracy. “In the past two years, democracies have become stronger, not weaker,” he declared. “Autocracies have grown weaker, not stronger.”

In reality, the picture is murkier. Global democracy has now declined for 17 straight years, according to a new report by Freedom House—although there are new signs that this “long freedom recession may be bottoming out, which would set the stage for a future recovery.”

To assess the state of the world, the organization scored 195 countries and 15 territories by 25 indicators before tallying their final grade to measure whether they are “Free,” “Partly Free,” or “Not Free.” In 2022, 35 countries’ grades dropped while 34 countries improved—marking an overall decline in global freedoms.

But the narrow gap in the sizes of these groups—the smallest it’s been in 17 years—is also reason for optimism. In comparison to 2021, for example, 60 countries declined, vastly outnumbering the 25 countries that recorded improvements. In 2020, the situation was even bleaker: 73 countries declined while only 28 improved. 

“The pace of decline and the geographic spread of decline is noticeably slowing,” said Yana Gorokhovskaia, one of the report’s co-authors. “This might be reason to kind of hope that we are approaching a turning point.”

From Cuba to Iran, protests and individual resistance have also played a key role in adding pressure on governments, even in the face of crackdowns and suppression. “The years have shown that popular challenges to authoritarian rule are a recurring theme in even the most repressive societies,” the report said. 

“The demand for freedom is pretty persistent, and democratic progress is possible because there’s always that demand,” Gorokhovskaia said. “It really means that the onus is on democracies and civil society to provide support for people who are struggling for freedom.”

Georgia’s controversial “Russian law.” The Georgian government scrapped a controversial law after violent protests erupted across the country in opposition to draft legislation that would force media and nongovernmental organizations to register as “foreign agents” if more than one-fifth of their funding comes from overseas sources. The law—which protesters have billed the “Russian law”—resembles legislation that Moscow has used to tighten control, stoking fears of a similar trajectory in Georgia.

“The whole society united [in] really pushing back this law because we know what happened in Russia,” Eka Gigauria, executive director of Transparency International Georgia, told FP’s Amy Mackinnon. “There is war in Ukraine, but we also have war with Russian type of rule here.”

Zelensky invites McCarthy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has asked U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to come to Ukraine to see “how we work, what’s happening here, what war caused us, which people are fighting now, who are fighting now,” CNN reported. “And then after that, make your assumptions,” Zelensky added.

As the Republican Party debates the future of U.S. aid to Ukraine, McCarthy—while expressing his support for Kyiv—has said they won’t write a “free blank check” for it. In response to Zelensky’s invitation, McCarthy doubled down on his statements, telling CNN: “I don’t have to go to Ukraine to understand where there’s a blank check or not.”

Greece’s train crash disaster. Tens of thousands of people joined protests that roiled Greece on Wednesday in a sweeping display of outrage over a train crash that killed 57 people last week. For many protesters, the tragedy highlighted the deteriorating condition of the country’s railway system and long-standing railway safety issues.

Chile’s airport shootout. Chilean security officials thwarted an attempted $32.5 million heist at an airport in Santiago, Chile, on Wednesday, authorities said. An estimated 10 robbers were involved, according to officials, and a shootout ensued. One security official and one robber were killed. 

• The U.S. Needs to Talk About the Risk of War With China by Doug Bandow

• America Is Too Scared of the Multipolar World by Stephen M. Walt

• A Private Company Is Using Social Media to Track Down Russian Soldiers by Jack Hewson 

Tired of jiu-jitsu and boxing? A new—and unorthodox—kind of fighting has been making headlines: slap fighting. A Power Slap League even exists despite considerable safety concerns and questions of whether it should even be deemed a sport.

“They’re trying to dress up a really stupid activity to try to make money,” Chris Nowinski, CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, told The Associated Press, adding that it is “one of the stupidest things you can do.”