IN my last Wednesday piece, I looked at the Kaieteur News (KN) assigning an entire page to the 2026 global democracy assessment of an organisation at a university in Sweden named Varieties of Democracy Institute.
There is no need to repeat sections of that Wednesday column, so I will move on to the comparative assessment section of the report. This is where countries are categorised as being more and less democratic.
Once you follow world political trends, then it is clear to a university freshman in the social sciences that this institute’s work is not only highly suspicious, but may in fact be made of bogus stuff.
The democratic comparisons simply make no sense. Obvious editorial incompetence and a colonial mentality allowed Kaieteur News to devote an entire page to this bogus institute. I called KN’s editor, Arianna Gordon, to get a comment from her as to her judgement in giving a whole page spread to the V-Dem nonsense. She said she was at a meeting and will get back to me. She never did.
V-Dem listed 31 countries that are the world’s most democratic states. Of that 31, 22 are White countries. Of that 31, 20 are European. Australia heads the list as the most democratic. Now what social, legal and political structure Australia has that the other 30 do not. What things in Australia make it more democratic than the rest of world? What exactly are these things?
The fraud in the V-Dem publication is that it does not explain its ratings. So, the researcher will never know why Australia is numero uno. But does Australia deserve its top spot? Australia is one of the world’s most shameless violators of international laws governing refugee treatment.
They forcefully remove refugees and send them to an island in the South Pacific. Australia is one of the White countries of the world that is known to be racist.
The V-Dem farce becomes more intriguing because if Australia commits these two immoral things and is yet at the top, then logical deduction will inform you that the other 30 states commit greater immoralities than Australia. Interestingly, Ireland has a more humane approach to refugees and Ireland is generally viewed by the non-White races of the world as the least racist White country.
So, it begs the question – why is Australia number one and not Ireland? Could it be rule of law, right to free speech, freedom of the press, governmental accountability, governmental transparency, etc…? It cannot be! Ireland is on par with any democratic country in the characteristics listed above. So why is Australia above it?
The more you examine V-Dem research, the more it stares you in the face that this is a con job. Canada is not in the highest bracket of liberal democracy. It is situated in the second-bracket electoral democracy. This V-Dem thing is a circus. Canada in every area of national life is more democratic than all of the countries of Europe.
Canada is less racist than all of the European countries that are in the upper bracket of democracy. Canada is number two on the list of electoral democracies. Brazil is on top. In every aspect of governance, Canada is more democratic that Brazil. The average policeman in Canada is an angel compared to his counterpart in Brazil.
The fraud and racist bias of the V-Dem institute gets uglier when you look at the third category which is given the title electoral autocracies. The highest classification is liberal democracy, then, below that is electoral democracy. Then there is electoral autocracy. It is when you come to examining this category, you see the nastiness in the V-Dem research.
India is listed as a country in the category of electoral autocracy. Can you believe that Israel is classified as a more democratic state than India? Let’s do some logical deduction. The central government of India’s policy towards Muslims in India could have led to India being deemed an electoral autocracy. But Israel’s genocidal brutality of the Palestinian is a crime against humanity.
How, given its anti-civilisation record, Israel is listed by V-Dem as more democratic than the following countries – Guyana, Jamaica, Greece, the Dominican Republic, Suriname, Portugal, and dozens of other nations.
So, what makes V-Dem report an immoral, degenerate act of dishonesty? Three reasons stand out: one is that there is no research done in 90 percent of the countries V-Dem reports on. Secondly, and this is closely tied up with number one, V-Dem is involved in cut and paste. Many of the countries V-Dem reports on is done through cut and paste without research personnel living in the countries themselves. Thirdly, V-Dem is simply Eurocentric, so Europe will always come out on top.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.
