Seventy-four percent of Turks believe the state of democracy in their country is somewhat bad or in danger, according to the findings of a survey conducted for a report by The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) published on Thursday.
Titled “Transatlantic Trends 2022,” the report presents the results of surveys conducted in 14 countries — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States — in a bid to provide a detailed picture of public opinion on core and contemporary issues.
According to the report, the share of Turkish respondents saying their democracy is in a good state decreased from 35 percent to 21 percent, while 46 percent say democracy is in danger, an increase of 7 points from 39 percent in 2021.
Twenty-eight percent of Turkish respondents said they perceive the state of democracy in their country as “somewhat bad.”
“Within the transatlantic community, respondents’ appraisal of the state of democracy in their country has dropped on average from 55% in 2021 to 50% in 2022. Swedish (72%) and Canadian (65%) respondents are still the most satisfied with their democracy, while Polish (36%), Italian (31%), and Turkish (21%) ones remain the least satisfied,” the insights from the report published on the GMF website read.
Turkey was ranked 147th among 179 countries in the liberal democracy index of the Swedish-based Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, placed among the bottom 20 percent, according to the V-Dem report published in March.
Turkey is among the 10 countries that “autocratized” the most, together with Brazil, India, Poland, Serbia and Hungary, according to the “Democracy Report 2022.”
The report classified Turkey as an electoral autocracy and placed it among the countries with toxic levels of political polarization.