The parliament in Helsinki is to debate and vote on joining the alliance without waiting for Sweden, or the approval of Turkey and Hungary.

Ankara, which has been hostile to Swedish membership of NATO in particular, halted negotiations in January after anti-Turkish demonstrations in Stockholm.

​​When I learned last month that Turkey had placed a $500,000 bounty on my head, part of me was flattered.

Turkey has targeted me for years because I have used my platform as a professional basketball player to denounce its strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. His regime has revoked my passport, filed 12 lawsuits against me, and put my name on Interpol’s “Red Notice” list. It has come after my family too. The government raided my home in Turkey and imprisoned my father. It also seems to have gotten my brother fired from his basketball team and prevented my sister from finding a job. I was pretty sure I had been a headache for Erdoğan—the $500,000 was proof.

The earthquake that struck Turkey earlier this month represents one of the biggest disasters the country has ever faced. I was devastated when I heard the news. Despite what Erdoğan has done, I love my country and its people, and I’m proud to be a Turk. I have many family members and friends still living there. They are fine, fortunately, but thousands of lives have been destroyed.

[Read: Earthquakes are unlike any other environmental disaster]

The world has generously offered much-needed resources to help us recover. But it hasn’t done enough to stop a populist authoritarian from hijacking the democracy I knew as a kid.

After a coup failed to oust him in 2016, Erdoğan took full control of the legislature and judiciary. Many people objected, of course, but he quickly stamped out dissent. Virtually overnight he dismissed thousands of judges who could have resisted his orders. He didn’t have to tolerate anyone who didn’t like him; he could simply discard them.

Remember Erdoğan’s visit to Washington, D.C., in 2017? When peaceful protesters—most of them American—gathered outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence, Erdoğan watched as his security detail kicked, punched, and choked them, seemingly in response to his own orders. Just think for a moment: He did that in the capital of the world’s strongest sovereign state. What do you think he does to his own citizens in his own country, where he has virtually unlimited power?

Human-rights groups give us a sense. Freedom House’s overall evaluation of Turkey is simply “not free.” Amnesty International has slammed Turkey’s human-rights violations, which have been carried out under the pretext of anti-terror measures. The World Justice Project ranks Turkey 117th out of 139 countries in its Rule of Law Index. Erdoğan may think of himself as a historically great leader, but he is taking a country that I love to unprecedented lows.

In 2021, I became an American citizen. It has been a joy to see up close the democratic values that I’ve long cherished. I feel lucky to live in such a country. But do I feel safe? It is hard to answer “yes” to that question when the Turkish regime continues to harass people like me, who have left the country for political reasons. Even though we’re gone, Erdoğan wants to deny us the peace and dignity that come with living in a democracy. Turkey has reportedly kidnapped 98 people from 34 countries. When I was in Indonesia in 2017, I narrowly avoided being kidnapped myself. We don’t know what happened to all of those who were captured, but reports of torture abound.

Erdoğan doesn’t mind using his leverage with the West to further his hunt for dissidents. Recently, Erdoğan tried to compel Sweden and Finland to extradite up to 130 of his critics in exchange for supporting their NATO-membership bids. Because NATO decisions require unanimity, Turkey’s support for new members is essential. Instead of using this fact to promote Turkey’s interests, he uses it to enact vengeance on his perceived enemies.

Erdoğan’s targets cannot protect themselves. And even if they could, constantly looking over one’s shoulder is no way to live. Democracies must stand together to keep them safe. The cost of promoting human rights around the world is steep, but the West has a moral duty to keep paying it.

I recognize that, here in the U.S., we have many differences of opinion on any number of issues. Tolerating them helps us prosper, but we can’t forget our shared ideals. When it comes to the value of human life and the right to dissent, we must set aside our disagreements.

Some claim that an autocratic leader in a remote location can’t harm the U.S. and its allies. This is myopic. Look at the wedge that Erdoğan is driving through the West, leaving Nordic countries vulnerable to potential Russian aggression. Our leniency toward Erdoğan inspires other autocratic regimes, such as Iran, which murders its own citizens who protest for freedom and dignity. We don’t have the luxury to limit the fight for democracy to our own soil or bow to Erdoğan’s blackmail.

[Ayşegül Sert: Turkey’s trust in government has turned to dust]

The presidential elections in Turkey are only a few months away, and Erdoğan is more vulnerable than ever. He has failed to stem a years-long economic crisis, and the recent earthquake has revealed the depths of his incompetence. He will come under increasing pressure to further consolidate his power and shore up support however he can. His regime will keep trying to sow discord outside Turkey, especially in Europe, where there is a significant Turkish diaspora. If he thinks that putting a bounty on a basketball player will help him, we need to think more creatively about what else he might be willing to try.

Erdoğan is getting desperate—and even more dangerous. A deputy in his party recently promised to “destroy” dissidents no matter where they are in the world. That his regime feels comfortable threatening the lives of opposition members in sovereign states is a sure sign the West is failing. We must make clear that he will be shunned from the world stage if he continues down this path. If we don’t, what will he have to lose?

Olympic champion sets a new pole vault world record of 6.22 metres at an indoor meeting in France.

In early December, I received an electricity bill for 1,400 British pounds ($1,700). It was an absurd overcharge for six months of energy I hadn’t used, in a house I moved out of two years ago, from a company that was no longer my supplier. “Oh well,” I said to myself, “it’s just an obvious clerical error.” I assumed the problem would be resolved in an hour, tops.

I was wrong. I called the company seven times. I contacted its WhatsApp support line six times. I sent emails. Each time, someone new responded, restarting the entire process. At one point, I got a text from a subsidiary debt-collection agency threatening my credit rating. Finally, I was notified last week that the mistaken bill had been withdrawn. I had spent more than 20 hours of my life across two months fixing the company’s mistake. The company faced no penalty.

[Annie Lowrey: The time tax]

Although my example is drawn from my life in the U.K., I’m from the U.S. originally and I know that virtually all Americans will experience a version of this story. And plenty of them won’t know their rights, or won’t be able to spare 20 hours on hold, and they’ll take on huge debts as a result. Many people won’t just waste time on hold with private companies but with the government as they try to navigate the maddening labyrinth of benefits programs.

We tend to simply accept such experiences as a feature of modern life. But we shouldn’t. Good governments should make fixing these everyday failures a priority—and they just might help bolster the case for democracy if they do.

For the past several years, I and other scholars have been observing the erosion of American democracy. As a political scientist, I’ve studied authoritarianism and interviewed dissidents and despots across the globe to understand how and why democracies collapse. In the United States, all of the warning signs are blinking red. According to a recent New York Times poll, 71 percent of Americans say that “democracy is currently under threat.”

However, when voters in the 2022 midterms were asked to identify their top concern, only 7 percent identified democracy as the motivating factor for their vote. What explains that disconnect?

Democracy requires two forms of legitimacy to survive: input legitimacy and output legitimacy. Input refers to processes and procedures. Was the rule of law upheld? Did the election get certified properly? Are democratic norms being followed? Output refers to government effectiveness.

Most of the “save democracy” discourse during the Donald Trump years rightly focused on the input side of the equation, because the president posed an existential threat to the systems that differentiate democracy from authoritarianism. But commentators sometimes overlooked why so many people were willing to accept Trump’s attacks against the inputs. One reason may be that they felt the output side had already deteriorated.

Democracy usually isn’t under threat where it delivers. Conversely, people are less likely to rally to defend democracy if they believe the system is failing them. An international survey by Pew Research has found that only 41 percent of Americans are “satisfied” that democracy is working well, compared with 65 percent in Germany, 66 percent in Canada, 76 percent in New Zealand, and 79 percent in Sweden. And American output legitimacy is falling. Twenty years ago, about 60 percent of Americans had faith in the U.S. government to solve domestic problems. Today, that’s down to an abysmal 39 percent.

Think income inequality, an extortionate health-care system, and rural decay. Think, too, about the senses many people have that the sources of power—both public and private—are far away and unresponsive, and that when something goes wrong, they’re on their own. Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has argued that this anger breeds a “politics of resentment.”

Democracy’s ideal is built on a foundation of accountability. In the past, many, if not most, of the decisions that mattered to our lives were taken by people and businesses that felt close to us. That’s not the case anymore. Now all roads seem to lead to bad hold music.

[Read: Why airlines can get away with bad customer service]

Whenever we encounter a problem we didn’t create—like my outrageous electricity charge, or vacations ruined by an incompetent airline, or hospital-billing errors, or a mix-up at the IRS—all we can really do is go online for a customer-service number and cross our fingers that, by some miracle, the call won’t consume the entire day, or worse. When a person coping with cancer treatment spends hours on the phone with her insurance company or Medicaid, she may wonder why her society is so cruel, or so incompetent, or both. And she may start to see the appeal of a demagogue who promises to deliver simple solutions: the “I alone can fix it” candidate.

Experiences with distant power centers may also lead to conspiratorial thinking—to paranoid notions about who’s “really” pulling the levers. Two in five Americans now agree that it is definitely or probably true that “regardless of who is officially in charge of the government and other organizations, there is a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.” Belief in that conspiracy theory is nine percentage points higher than it was last year.

Not for nothing, authoritarian populist messages usually take aim at a faraway, unresponsive, and faceless elite. For much of the population, that is the experience of power. Granted, authoritarian governments are objectively far worse at helping citizens deal with routine problems. Good luck trying to complain to the Chinese Communist Party or to the Kremlin. But for democracy to be saved from proto-authoritarian political movements, such as Trumpism, democracy can’t be viewed, as Winston Churchill put it, as only “the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” People in power need to proactively make the case for democracy through good governance at the level of everyday life.

That’s why President Joe Biden’s recent focus in the State of the Union address on “junk fees” was wise. This kind of policy sends a much-needed message: You should have democracy’s back, because it has yours. Routine dysfunction matters. Companies that engage in predatory billing, like the power company that wrongly charged me 1,400 pounds, should face serious fines. Corporations that steal your time through their own mistakes should be forced to compensate you for that time. Similarly, regulators should ensure that it is as easy to cancel a service as it is to sign up for it.

[Read: America’s most powerful medical debt collector]

In the European Union, if an airline causes a flight delay of more than three hours, it has to pay you 250 to 600 euros, depending on the length of the flight. In the U.K., when a train is more than 15 minutes late, I can go to a website and, in a few minutes, demand financial compensation.

For the most part in America, when you screw up, you pay, but when corporations or governments screw up, nobody pays. Even when protections do exist, they’re difficult to navigate, or are unknown to most citizens. Other democracies have made clear it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not rocket science to solve such maddening everyday problems, and American democracy would be better off if the government devoted more effort to it.

Dangerous would-be autocrats across the globe have attacked democratic norms, procedures, and institutions. More people will join the fight for democracy when they feel that democracy delivers for them. But for many people right now, their lived experience of democracy feels a lot like being stuck on hold.

When it comes to friendships between nations, not much comes between Sweden and my home country of Finland.

The warning from SÄPO follows an earlier alert from Swedish military intelligence, rating the current threat as the "most serious” it has been since the Cold War.

While there are several reasons why simultaneous accession remains the preferred option for all involved, Finland should be open to the prospect of joining without Sweden, Helmi Pillai argues.

The US secretary of state says Finland and Sweden have already taken 'concrete steps' to meet Ankara's requests.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on a visit to Turkey has repeats Washington’s support for Sweden and Finland’s quick accession to NATO.