You may want to consider whether the views of expats align with those staying in their home countries.

The standard for NATO has always been to only accept democracies

As defined by whom exactly? Chinese citizens will tell you that they’re in a democracy and very satisfied with it, much more so than Spaniards for example (my homeland)

I’d even go so far as to make respect of human rights a demand too like we have in EU

EU is literally funding the genocide of Palestinians with 0 economic or political sanctions to Israel coming from governments. By that logic, all of EU deserves out of NATO immediately. NATO also triggered the Libyan civil war through bombing, bombed Yugoslavia, and many NATO countries directly participated in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

No serious political scientist claims democracy is a matter of ideology or “who feels represented.”

This simply isn’t true, ask Cuban political scientists or Chinese ones or Vietnamese ones.

There is broad cross-national agreement

Argument from the majority. By that logic, Taylor Swift objectively makes the best music in the planet, and Jazz isn’t real music.

There’s no need for a supranational authority to decide this any more than there is one for physics

Ridiculous comparison. Political sciences are not a hard science, and different political systems give rise to different interpretations. The fact is that this “broad cross-national agreement” is rejected by many, many scholars, particularly Marxist ones, with Marxist political scientists describing the western system as “bourgeois democracy”, meaning that despite suffrage once every four years, the outcomes are functionally the same as if only the 10% wealthiest voted. This is serious criticism based on empirical studies (such as likelihood of laws to pass based on what percentage of the population agree with them by income), and you cannot simply disregard it as “it’s not the consensus”.

The decisive distinction is whether these actions can be challenged, exposed, reversed, and punished

Macron is president and won’t go to jail, the ECB is still operative and no bureaucrat will go to jail for destroying the Greek economy, nobody has gone to jail in Spain for tampering with democracy and fabricating false evidence from within the police, and the judges in the highest court of Germany won’t go to jail.

they lose their freedom, their lives, or very famously, fall out of windows

The fact that you aren’t aware of these things happening in Europe or the USA doesn’t mean they don’t happen. You could look up the cases of Rita Barberá or Miguel Blesa, both higher ups of the conservative party in Spain (PP) who died in mysterious circumstances shortly before going to trial, or Fabra winning the lottery 3 or 4 times. Ask the Catalonian pro-independence politicians if there is democracy and political freedom in Spain, with many of them enjailed or fleeing the country as political refugees. Ask Julian Assange or Edward Snowden about freedom in western “democracies”.

In Romania, they declared a candidate illegal

In Estonia they also recently determined a decade in jail for a few pro-Russian politicians. Not saying that necessarily that’s a bad thing, those are just right wing ghouls, my problem is more why those same mechanisms aren’t used against our autoctonous far-right

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I doubt political scientists in China agree with, say, German political scientists’ definition of democracy. What supranational organization will decide which country’s political scientists are correct?

I could perfectly well argue that France isn’t Democratic. The majority of the population voted for a leftist coalition that is being blocked by the president of the republic from being elected, and Macron has already skipped the democratic will of the people by declaring emergency measures to pass antidemocratic legislation such as the increase of retirement age.

In Greece, when a leftist government (Syriza) was elected around 2010 after the huge economic crisis around a platform of reviewing the state debt and democratically decided on referendum to do so, the European Central Bank threatened with dropping its obligations towards Greece and forced neoliberal austerity policy.

In Berlin, the people democratically voted through direct referendum for a cap to rent prices, and shortly after the highest court of Germany declared it illegal and rent prices were uncapped again (despite economic studies of the policy results in its limited lifespan prove it was effective in lowering rent pricing).

In Spain (my homeland), when a leftist party (Podemos) was getting ranked 3rd in the country by polls and was on trend to overtake the socialdemocrats (PSOE), an illegal police operation directed from the ministry of internal affairs fabricated false evidence of funding of said leftist party from Venezuela and Iran and leaked these falsified police reports to all media before the elections, which destroyed the popularity of the party.

I gotta say, being a leftist in Europe, it doesn’t feel democratic at all that all the choice we have is to vote once every four years the colour of the party that will impose neoliberal austerity policy and raise military expenditure (all countries in the EU do this)

Why do you ignore every other conflict in the comment above?

No need to be rude.

Also: “yes, I support the military budgets because I’m convinced Russia is an imperialist aggressor nation that we need to defend ourselves from” was the justification for Germany entering WW1. Have we learnt nothing from history?

And who decides which countries are democratic and which are not?

What if China wants to join? Or Russia? What would be the policy?