In a public lecture, ‘The Despot Accomplice: how the West is aiding and abetting the decline of democracy’ at the London School of Economics a few days ago, Brian Klaas (http://www.lse.ac.uk/), among other things, made the point that 2006 was the peak year for democracy and that people are now losing faith in it. The West has essentially given up on democracy and even where it is being promoted, the baseline of acceptability is set too low. Take the cases of Belarus and Madagascar.
The former became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991, and the country’s first and only directly elected president has been Aleksandr Lukashenko, who has consistently been accused of serious human rights violations and elections rigging.
