Having some time to reflect between the posts, I realised what triggered me was your reaction to my initial comment Turkey's election being fair, by listing the various areas which they have fell short (e.g the jailing of journalists, media control etc)
For an Asian like myself, we see such replies (and the Index) as a very "Western response" and for some, condesending. The Index isn't wrong, and your points are absolutely factual. While it might be a stretch for me to speak on behalf of Asians, I suspect we operate on a different scale and I call that scale "good enough". At least for me, Turkiye's election was "good enough". The United States, for all its issues, is "good enough".
Using Thailand as an example, "good enough" means the recent election was conducted with reasonable transparency, and people got a chance to vote and this showed with Move Forward and Pheu Thai getting the majority of the vote, blocking the military led parties. By most western democracy standards, the military played the same games as Erdogan + using the monachy/lese-majesty to gain an unfair unadvantage. But I see the vote as ultimately successful. For me, "bad" is military coup and rule, like Myanmar. For us, even a flawed democracy is better than no democracy. For us, jailing journalists, dirty tricks, gerrymandering the electoral rules, appealing to extremist ideas are just part of the whole political landscape and isn't shocking.
Therefore, the idea of calling out another country's flaws and have institutions dedicated to this topic seems self-indulgent, when inflation, cost of living, rents, jobs are usually the more pressing topics in Asian countries. Before you say, all the more we should push for democracy, it is not a silver bullet for the short term economic development issues. Democracy is good, but it is a means to an end (e.g stability), which allows for consistent development policies. Of course, elimination of corruption and good goverance is a benefit of it.
