Now, right now, it is time to get out of this absurdity that is disproved by everything. It is not democracy that is weakening while the authoritarian regimes supposedly assert themselves. It is not arbitrariness that supposedly demonstrates its superiority over the rule of law. No, it is exactly the opposite. Let us open our eyes and see the facts.

Iran, first of all. Here is a country where all the power is in the hands of a Supreme Guide, a cleric supported by the Revolutionary Guards, in whose hands most of the armed force and national wealth is concentrated. The only candidates for president and parliament that Iranians can vote for are those approved by the theocracy. Legitimised by religion, the Iranian dictatorship is even more total than the Chinese one, but with what results?

There is no longer a region, a generation or a professional milieu that has not rebelled against this regime. Iran has been demonstrating for a month and neither live ammunition, nor beatings to death in police stations, nor mass arrests, nor rapes between two police trucks – nothing seems to be able to stop the revolt of this people. Sparked by the murder of a young girl whose veil the police had judged insufficiently modest, this popular indignation movement is becoming a revolution because the Iranians can no longer stand to be governed by incompetents rooted in a bygone era, while they live on the web, in the age of the West and high technology, and when it comes to the lives of couples, women have for a long time imposed a birth rate similar to those in Europe.

Under the veil, Iran has entered this century. Under the veil, this country, whose cinema expresses all its modernity, aspires to freedom, and even if the violence of repression was to succeed in making it give in temporarily, the mullahs’ record would still be one of economic, moral and political bankruptcy.

So much for the superiority of dictatorship! What about China?

Order reigns there, as blithely impeccable as the attire of the 2000 delegates at the party congress, but behind this façade, the reality is quite different. Like the Russian Bolsheviks after their New Economic Policy of the 1920s, Mr Xi and his obligors became afraid of the development of the private sector and the diversity bubbles it carried. They reversed course, refocused the decision, brought back the economy under state control and eliminated all their rivals in the name of fighting corruption. China has taken such a huge leap backwards that its economic growth rate is now largely far from being the highest in Asia. At the same time, the “zero Covid” policy and its mass confinements have done nothing to help while the huge property sector threatens to collapse, the population shrinks and working hands will start to be missing from the industry and the payment of pensions.

In front of his delegates, Mr Xi proclaims the superiority of his model, but he could soon find himself in very poor shape because, when it comes to reckoning, an autocrat is, by definition, held responsible for everything.

It is he and he alone who has linked his regime to the shakiest of dictatorships, the one in Moscow, the one that has destabilised the world economy by bringing war to Ukraine and thus restricted the international trade on which China is so dependent. It was Mr Xi who proclaimed the “unlimited friendship” between the Chinese and Russian dictatorships. It was he who had bet on this war because he believed it would demonstrate the decadence of the West but, eight months later, it is the structural weakness of the dictatorships that is revealed because how can the failure of the Russian aggression be explained?

How can the largest of the world’s countries fail in the face of Ukrainian resistance if it is not because Vladimir Putin was the only one making decisions, that no one dared to raise the slightest objection to him, that his reality was the one that imposed itself on his entire apparatus and that the military themselves could not tell him the dangers of his war?

It is not yet time to foresee the simultaneous collapse of the Iranian and Russian regimes and the weakening that losing these two allies would cause in Beijing. We are not there yet, but the strength of dictatorships? The weakness of democracies? Let us open our eyes and notice.

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