Medical reports

Telling a democracy from a dictatorship is not as easy as it seems. Though periodical elections might be considered a good indicator, the world is full of dictators elected in fixed elections that shut out the opposition. Some regimes have an understanding with the opposition: it can run for elections, provided it has no intention of winning them. Nor should we forget that dictatorships have widely differing formats. A totalitarian regime that aims to hold every string of power (state, market, parties, unions, news media) is not the same thing as the so-called authoritarian regimes where a limited pluralism exists, and a partially independent civil society. As Machiavelli observed, there are dictatorships that are content to be feared, which only requires repressing the opposition and rewarding one's adherents; and others, more megalomaniac, that want to be loved - which demands an intense process of propaganda and collective brainwashing under the aegis of some or other ideology. Whether this ideology has any doctrinal merit (such as Marxism-Leninism) or is a mere joke (the North Korean "juche" creed) counts for little.

Democracies, too, are not so easy to distinguish. Many are democracies for only one day every four years, thus earning the label of "electoral" democracies. Some of them even engineer the paradox of being democracies and not respecting human rights or the principle of equality before the law, so that we call them "liberal" democracies. Other democracies, such as those of Israel, or apartheid South Africa, are only such for part of the population, being quite unfazed by the contradiction of distinguishing, within the same territory, between free citizens and a subjugated class of helots.

Finally, in many of them, as we see in the popularity of the slogan "real democracy now," questions such as legitimacy, representation and accountability are under so deep a shadow that the word democracy sometimes seems like a shell devoid of content.

The organization Freedom House rates democracies on a scale of one to seven, from more to less free. Other scales, such as the Polity IV project, use a variety of data on political regimes (going back to the year 1800, no less), and propose a 21-point classification that runs from -10 to +10. Then there is the Democracy Index of The Economist, which reviews 167 countries in terms of six categories, distinguishing between complete democracies, defective ones, hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes. The scale of grays is so broad that we sometimes have to bend our definitions.

However, all this analytical sophistication might seem pointless, were we to factor in a somewhat atypical indicator: official reports on the health of the head of state. According to a story in this newspaper on May 22, 1976, the New China News Agency denied as "pure nonsense" the rumors about Mao's health (he died in September). A year later, in 1977, while Le Figaro told of Brezhnev's fragile health, Pravda affirmed that he had recovered from an "indisposition" in his dacha, and would soon reappear. As for Franco, a first medical report bent over backwards so as not to speak of the heart attack he had suffered. The prize, perhaps, goes to Kim Jong Il, who missed his regime's 60th anniversary parade - but the official news agency didn't bat an eyelid, terming the rumors about his illness "a conspiracy."

Now, the soap opera about what was first called Hugo Chávez's "pelvic abscess" and his convalescence in Havana, gives a clear indication as to the way the regime in Caracas is headed. Chávez could hardly have picked a better host, Castro having announced in 2006, five years ago now, that his operation would keep him off the job for "several weeks." The photo of the two together last week speaks volumes: the Tracksuit Alliance is now official. By their medical reports ye shall know them.