BEIJING — The Great Depression of the 1930s undermined liberal democracy and fuelled fascism. Is it possible that the current global crisis will have the opposite effect, undermining autocrats and making democracy bloom?

Trying to tell the future is a mug's game, but there are some encouraging signs. Consider the situation confronting those three amigos of authoritarianism: Vladimir Putin of Russia, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

All three looked like big men when oil was going for $100 a barrel and more. Spitting defiance at the West, they seemed to represent a new form of populist authoritarianism that could rival the appeal and strength of the democracies. These days, with oil at $40 and below, they have lost some of their swagger.

Russia depends on energy exports for half its budget. The economic growth that has spread a new measure of wealth around the country in the past few years springs mainly from oil and gas, which make up 8 per cent of its exports. The government has already gone through a third of its foreign exchange reserves trying to defend the faltering ruble. Russian companies need to repay $400-billion (U.S.) in loans. Foreign investors have pulled more than $290-billion out of the country since the summer.

Mr. Putin, the Prime Minister, and his creation, President Dmitry Medvedev, are still popular, but how long before the business and other elites who back them sour on them? How long before the Russian people grow weary of their strutting leaders if misery spreads?

Mr. Putin already seems to be taking a somewhat softer line. At the recent annual Davos meeting, he made a point of praising open economies and governments. At home, he called in the editors of an outspoken newspaper to say he regretted the murder of one of their reporters and supported rival voices in the press. Crocodile tears, perhaps, but not long ago he might not have bothered to shed them at all.

In Venezuela, Mr. Chavez is holding a referendum this month to prolong his rule, already a decade old. Polls suggest he may win it. Even so, the falling oil price has hurt him. Venezuela depends on oil for 90 per cent of its exports. Yet, output has been declining. Last month, The New York Times reported that Mr. Chavez was quietly courting the Western oil giants whose fields he once nationalized. Venezuela gets by on large-scale food imports supported by oil revenue. Those will be harder to afford as the economy contracts this year. Mr. Chavez's bluster about evil Western plots is beginning to ring hollow.

In Iran, too, economic decline could threaten the theocratic regime. The country needs a price of $75 a barrel or its current account balance, a measure of trade and investment, goes into the red. It relies on high oil to pay for the enormous food and fuel subsidies that make life more bearable for its citizens and cover up the gross inefficiency of the government. Mr. Ahmadinejad, the demagogue who talks of wiping out Israel, has failed to follow through on his promise to lick unemployment and raise living standards. He now faces a challenge from former president Mohammad Khatami, who declared last weekend that he would stand against him in a June 12 presidential vote.

Now consider an even bigger prize: China. For years, there has been a kind of implicit contract between regime and people: You leave us alone to rule unopposed and we will help you get rich. If the rulers can't show them the money any more, the deal is off.

The legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party relies almost entirely on its success at delivering three decades of uninterrupted economic progress. Now an interruption is coming. China's growth, which soared into double digits in the past few years, has fallen below the 8 per cent a year that authorities reckon is necessary to prevent mass unemployment. Millions of migrant workers are streaming home to their impoverished villages, thrown out of their factory jobs by a sudden crash in Chinese exports to the rest of the world.

The economic crisis is the greatest challenge to the regime since the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989. Drought, flood and pestilence once signalled that Chinese rulers had lost the "mandate of heaven." Today's economic storm could do the same.

With luck and good management, China's rulers will pull through. They still have powerful levers at their command. So do Mr. Putin, Mr. Chavez and Mr. Ahmadinejad. They will not readily give up power. But the idea that they represent a new form of Teflon authoritarianism that can harness capitalism to maintain a permanent lock on power already looks a bit silly. Like those anywhere who rule by might, not democratic right, they are vulnerable.

mgee@globeandmail.com

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