HOW IT STARTED:

President Joe Biden tied the wars in Ukraine and Israel together during a primetime Oval Office address Thursday, making an impassioned appeal to the American people to support two fellow democracies that he says are facing existential threats.

The president has often cast this moment in history as an “inflection point” – a battle between the world’s democracies and autocracies.

—“Biden makes the case for wartime aid to Israel and Ukraine in primetime address,” CNN.com, October 19th.

How it’s going:

Democracies do not ban opposition parties. The fact that so many such parties ever existed says something about the level of opposition faced by the Ukrainian nationalist government that came to power after the 2014 revolution. Then in May of 2022, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law formally banning all these parties. President Volodymyr Zelensky signed the law. The list included the Opposition Platform for Life, which had held fully 10 percent of the seats in parliament. Among the 11 banned parties are the Socialist Party of Ukraine, the Progressive Socialist Party of the Ukraine, the Union of Left Forces, and the Communist Party of Ukraine.

Democracies do not ban elections, but Ukraine has put the democratic process itself on hold since declaring martial law in 2022. This hiatus was supposed to be temporary, but it has been repeatedly extended, most recently in July 2023. As a result of that vote in the Ukrainian parliament, where all opposition parties have been removed, the parliamentary elections scheduled for last month were canceled. Presidential elections were scheduled for March 2024, but under current rules they too will not be held, and Zelensky has stated that “now is not the time for elections.”

—“Ukraine Sure Doesn’t Look Like a Democracy Anymore,” Newsweek, Friday.