Is Climate Change Helping Authoritarians Seize Power?

Over the next six years, Duterte proved that his foul-mouthed maverick shtick wasn’t harmless posturing. He presided over a brutal war on drugs in which police and vigilantes — emboldened by the president — killed as many as 30,000 people, imposed martial law on an island home to 22 million for two and a half years, and signed a law that gave law enforcement broad authority to arrest and detain suspects without warrants.

Typhoon Yolanda “offered the Philippines’ presidential hopeful Rodrigo Duterte an avenue to exploit people’s helplessness to secure their support,” according to an economist who studies the ways storms affect democracy.

The past decade or so has given rise to a grim parade of Duterte-like candidates around the world — politicians who have obliterated the bounds of acceptable political discourse, scapegoated religious and ethnic minorities, dismissed journalism as fake news, sought to imprison their rivals, and undermined democratic checks and balances. In India, commonly referred to as “the world’s largest democracy,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi has vilified Muslims and carried out a campaign promise to build a Hindu temple on the site of a mosque razed by Hindu mobs. In Brazil, former President Jair Bolsonaro promoted a bill that would strip Indigenous tribes of control of their lands and unsuccessfully plotted a coup to remain in power after losing reelection. And in the United States, former President Donald Trump — currently running for reelection — separated immigrant children from their parents and incited a horde of supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol.