Lawfare Daily: Why Autocrats Hate Cities with Ambassador Nina Hachigian

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“I think autocrats tend to not like what cities stand for,”

so pluralism and individual freedoms. They make it difficult for autocrats to really consolidate, politically. It's the law fair podcast. I'm Tyler McBrion, managing editor of Law Fair.

With ambassador Nina Hachigian, president and CEO of the Alliance for Local Leaders International,

and the first U.S. Special Representative for City and State Diplomacy,

from 2022 to 2025. They are little democracies with three branches of government, with rights guaranteed, with transparency and accountability, and responsiveness and tangible progress, tangible delivery of what people need and want,

and that beeps are norms somewhat preserved. Today, we're talking about the ambassador's recent piece in Foreign Affairs, entitled The Autocrats Worst Enemy. We discussed how cities are both laboratories of democracy, and backstops against democratic backsliding,

as well as what U.S. mayors can learn about resisting autocracy, from their counterparts abroad. So ambassador, I wanted to start,

“if I may with a bit about your background,”

and the origins of your interest in this relationship between cities, democracy, international affairs, diplomacy. In other words, why did you write this? - Yeah, thank you for the question. So I had a kind of relatively traditional career in foreign policy,

you know, worked at Think Tank, and then was lucky to be an ambassador under President Obama. And then I came back to the U.S. and got an offer I couldn't refuse from Mayor Eric Arsetti of Los Angeles to be his first deputy mayor

of international affairs.

And in that job, I learned about just the incredible power of cities,

both in improving the lives of the residents of the city, but also in how they network internationally and learn tremendous amount from each other. So I'll give you two examples of that. So one, the mayor took a trip to Mexico City.

We have a sister city relationship with Mexico City. This was before I came on board. And he met with Claudia Schijnbaum, now the president of Mexico, and noticed that they had this earthquake early warning system that she told them about.

So he came back to Los Angeles and said, we need to have an earthquake early warning system. And so the city worked on that and set it up. So now, you know, you have residents in Los Angeles who have a few seconds to jump under a table

before the earthquake hits. And then the state since adopted it.

So now we have 40 million residents of California

who all can have this app on their phone that gives them a lot of time. So that's one example. Another is that he was chair of a group called C40. And that is the 100 or so biggest cities of the world.

All of whom have pledged to attack climate change because of the terrible effects it was having in all their cities, floods, heat, I don't have to go through it. And expensive energy. And so that collective has done a tremendous amount

toward taking carbon out of the atmosphere. And when you think about it, cities, they have public transit. That's if you electrify your public transit. That's a big step.

You can divert your organic waste. And that doesn't then create methane, which is worse than carbon, et cetera, et cetera. So those are two kinds of examples of how cities work internationally.

So that was that. And then I got a chance to do that work in the Biden administration, but not just for Los Angeles, but for all cities. In the United States, and then we did a lot of connectivity,

So the cities and states and counties

and the whole bot. And in that job, we did a lot of connecting across borders for learning, for shared problem solving, et cetera. And in that job, also--

“and we reached, I think, something like 5,000 local leaders”

and answer a lot of the questions and help them with their own international plans. I was expecting the biggest surprise of that job. I was expecting, you know, I'm coming from Los Angeles, a global city.

But there is interest across the United States in some of the smallest towns and cities in international work. But anyway, in that role, we did some a bunch of work on democracy.

And so I was aware.

I became aware of how cities

can preserve and exercise and innovate. The systems of democracy, the kinds of things that we take for granted, like guaranteeing people's freedoms, issuing permits, protest, and monitoring elections, and working with civil society, and being transparent,

and trying to be responsive to people's needs quickly and tangibly, all of that's democracy. And it happens in these many democracies all around the world. Thank you for that. That's really helpful set up.

And we will definitely dig into a lot of that municipal, multilateralism as you refer to it in your piece. And before we dig into the meat of your argument in your foreign affairs piece, I'm hoping you could shed a little light

on what happens in these offices of international affairs.

It's something that I've been curious about.

I live in New York City, and it's an inherently global city. And a lot of the work of city hall, regardless of the city, is inherently global in nature or democratic in nature, of course, which we will talk about.

“But what's a day in the life like at an international affairs office?”

And what types of cities have them versus don't? I obviously, New York, LA, I assume Chicago. How small of a city do you get where they don't really exist? Well, sadly, in the United States, the capacity for this international engagement

is actually quite limited. So you're pointed out that Los Angeles and New York have the biggest offices, New York has a lovely new commissioner. I really like her. She's really smart, a commissioner of international affairs.

And she's got a great team, and similarly with LA. And then it's like, you know, Seattle has one person. Atlanta may have a few San Antonio has one person. Like these big cities, Chicago has one person. And then most places have nobody.

And they're just, you know, the chief of staff is doing it or, you know, someone else, maybe occasionally you've got someone an economic development department who is doing these issues.

“But so, a day in the life really changes, depending on”

what kind of city you're talking about. And let me just draw a contrast here because Tokyo has like 50 people doing international affairs. And Shanghai has a 100. And even Buenos Aires has like 20.

So we really, I mean, in general, we under resource cities in the United States and when it comes to international engagement, you know, there's just no, there are very few cities that can afford to, you know, reap the benefits

of someone who's doing international work. But to answer your question, it could be that we are working on a community college program to send low-income community college students overseas for free to gain that like life

altering a mind-expanding experience. It could be that we are trying to attract businesses foreign businesses to set up. It could be that we are hosting a FIFA game, the mayor of Arlington, Texas was telling me

about how he set up office space for the countries. So that in case their fans had these problems or whatever medical problems that there was a place there near the stadium for the officials to be. And it could be solving this, you know,

could be during COVID, a lot of conversation with other cities around the world about what they were doing for testing, what they were doing for, you know, are they closing their schools or not?

And what's calculus? So a ton of sharing of best practices. - Thank you for that, as well. I wanna now zoom out the global work of cities and mayors is related to the argument you lay out

in your foreign affairs piece, but it's not so core to it, which is more of a democratic renewal, a democratic backsliding backstop argument as you refer to it. So I wanted to just give you a chance

to just lay out what you were trying to argue in your foreign affairs piece. You know, special focus on, especially the American case.

autocrats hate cities and the mayors who run them,

they can be opposition figures like in the case of Istanbul that mayors been thrown in jail.

“I think autocrats tend to not like what cities stand for.”

So pluralism and individual freedoms, they make it difficult for autocrats to really consolidate politically. Autocrats then in term persecute mayors. So you have mayors who are jailed or slandered,

and in the media, president who territory of the Philippines killed like 28 mayors. The mayor of the dance polling was assassinated. The mayor of Karakas was jailed. But another reason that they do that

is that mayors are preserving democracy.

They are kind of reservoirs of individual freedoms. They, as I said earlier, they keep alive these norms and the systems. They, you know, protect houses of worship. They may be giving, you know, funding or space

to civil society.

“They are responsive to the essential needs of their constituents”

in a tangible way that people can really see. They may create civic spaces that give the public a platform to defy the authoritarian. They're very innovative when it comes to democracy. And all of that kind of can be an antidote to the cynicism

that autocrats want residents, citizens to feel. Mayors can prevent the worst overreaches. So I can tell you the story of the Budapest Pride parade. So the mayor of Budapest is under the, you know, 16 years of Victor Orban fighting the defunding

that Orban was leveling against Budapest. They were like going, you know, on the verge of bankruptcy all the time. And so, you know, he would message to his residents using garbage cans and telling them that, you know, the reason

that your garbage is being picked up isn't because of the city.

“It's because Victor Orban took our money away, that kind of thing.”

So the central government made celebrating LGBTQ community illegal. And Budapest had had a pride parade, you know, for a long time. So the mayor said, OK, we're going to make this a Budapest pride parade, an municipal event.

And 10 times the number people came as had ever come before. And this was last year. So hundreds of thousands of people were crowding the streets of Budapest. And just that act, the fact that they were all

defying the authoritarian was kind of burst the aura of invincibility that Orban had. And of course, we know, like, you know, our current government is using Orban's consolidation as a blueprint. And that was one of the many reasons.

And there were many that Victor Orban's reign fell. Similarly in Caracas, they were huge protests against Maduro. And the prosecutor of Mayor Lopez, the mayor of Caracas, suggested that he had subliminally talked people into protesting and, you know, threw him in jail.

And then finally, like, mayors can act collectively,

as we've spoken about, but they can do so as well for democracy in rule of law in addition to, you know, other topics that we discussed. There's so many rich examples and case studies that you reference throughout the piece,

including Victor Orban's Hungary and Budapest. And many of them have different make-ups of government. And our sort of, you know, a long spectrum of autocracy. Can you drill down a bit and speak to how different forms of autocracy lend themselves to different relationships

between the autocrat and the city? So from, you know, fully consolidated autocracies insofar as they exist to less so, much less so in the US, for example, how does that change the dynamic? - Yeah, it changes a little lot.

So in Russia, China and North Korea, Iran, these are fully consolidated autocracies where any city leader is going to be, you know, a member of the party. And in those cases, they, I think,

tend to have relatively friendly relationships. I mean, probably not 100% of the time. But, you know, these were the oligarchs live. Like, this is where the fancy restaurants are. Like, this is, you know, this is where the economic drivers

are typically so they are assets to a regime

But what's on the rise today,

are these more elected autocrats? So they, they enter office being elected. And in those cases, because elections are still, you know, in the offing, even if they aren't fair, that then, then that can change

because the, you know, autocrats fear a popular, you know, opposition figure. Even if that person doesn't have, you know, ambitions to run for higher office, but many do. So the less consolidated, the more elections

are still possibility, the less, you know, cities are cherished by the national government. It's interesting though, in our country, like the attacks in Minneapolis, for example, like it's not like Mayor Fry's, you know,

going to run for, well, maybe he will run for president,

but he's not a, you know, an obvious, you know,

he's not like the mayor of Istanbul who like accepted the presidential nomination.

“So, you know, I think the politics are still there,”

but it isn't necessarily the mayor. It might just be what cities are standing for. pluralism, individual rights, you know. - Yeah, I also wonder if he will run because we do have this American convention

that you have to be bashful and, you know, say, no, thank you. I'm not gonna run and then that's usually a signal that you will be running. - I mean, there is a world like Mayor's become president all the time, like it's a very common place.

- And I actually wanted to ask about some of the counter examples there because some of the very same autocrats that you reference in your case studies themselves began their political careers as mayor's. So what about, what do you make of those contradictions?

Counter examples, is it just that mayors of big cities have big platforms and it's kind of an obvious springboard or yeah, I don't know what you make of the Erdogan's, the Duterte's. - Putin as well.

“Well, I think they know how powerful mayors are, right?”

So the first thing to do is to squash them, right?

So, and they know that's where they came from, right? So, the, you know, step one is to squash any popular opposition mayor that comes after you. - You know, I'm pretty sure you're not. - You're also in the Schweiz.

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- The new Volvo E60 is up to 800,000 km/h. - Now, we're going to the Volvo Hentler and the Volvo Car Stérie. - You mentioned this idea of cities as both generative for democracy, as these laboratories of democracy,

experimenting with direct democracy, like participatory budgeting, and then also as bastions against threats to democracy, so these backs up idea,

“could you break down a few examples of the latter category?”

So, you mentioned the LGBTQ pride parade, this kind of opening the discourse or bringing people back out on the streets. What other examples come to mind for that sort of backstop idea?

- Yeah, sure. I'll give you a couple examples. So, in Poland, there was a very draconian abortion law, even more draconian abortion law passed by the right-wing government,

and there was this uprising of women that was called the Women's Strike. And the mayor used the bus stop screens to support them, he marched with them. And again, that was one of the many protests

that eventually brought down that government. He ran for president unsuccessfully, but not by much. So, that's another example. In this country, I mean, you had Michelle Wu,

a Boston early in the Trump administration, like March, just speaking truth to power at a time when law firms were folding,

and she was taking the fight to him.

“Like, that's courageous, and that kind of,”

just even speaking out, gives others sucker, and is a way to be defined with authoritarian. I mean, obviously, we don't know. Our fall in freedoms is faster than anyone else's, Turkey, Hungary, Russia, even.

But, we're a big country, and there are a lot of cities, and there's a lot of states that are going to make it difficult to really consolidate, and so we'll see. I don't know what the end of our story looks like yet,

but I'm hopeful. - And I want to lay my cards in the table that I am hopeful as well, and I found the peace and evidence really compelling,

and I've long been interested in city and state diplomacy,

and subnational diplomacy. And yet, I couldn't help, but think of some of the limits of the analysis of the mayor, and the limits to mayoral power, especially in federal system we have,

even going back to Little Rock, for example, when the mayor of Little Rock requested troops from the president, but it wasn't really statorially required for the mayor to do so. The president could have done so anyway,

and even politically, when Zorin Mamdani was elected New York, you kept hearing this refrain that, well, New York is on America. It's, you know, those kinds of exceptional arguments of big cities, especially in the US,

vis-a-vis a rural population,

or the rest of the country. So what are the limitations here of mayoral power? I realize I'm putting you in an odd position, you know, given what you do and advocate, but yeah. - Yeah, I mean, of course, there are, right?

I mean, they have a huge amount of influence in their own metropolis. They can do a lot when they're acting collectively,

“but, you know, they are not the 100% answer, right?”

I mean, we need our democracy back at a national level too, in order to really, you know, be guaranteed of our freedoms. Otherwise, we can have troops sent into cities, and, you know, then there's, there's not a whole lot, you know, mayors and cities or passing ordinances all the time

that try to make it more difficult, but, you know, there's limits when you've got marines, you know, that, like Los Angeles had. But what I'm saying is that they are places to build back from. They are little democracies with three ranches of government,

with rights guaranteed, with transparency and accountability, and responsiveness, and tangible progress, tangible delivery of what people need and want, and that keeps our norms somewhat preserved, and makes that be that there are places that you can then, you know, rebuild.

Rebuild is not really the right word, built, 'cause obviously our democracy wasn't working great for everybody, to begin with, so we gotta rethink it. But if I can get on my federalism high horse for a minute, it drives me crazy that the federal government

can withhold money for basic services that cities deliver like infrastructure, like food, and housing, and the federal government has the ability to just say, nope, or not gonna give you that money

“that you need to provide these basic services.”

Like that is messed up. Like I know that our form of federalism stops at the state level, but it shouldn't. Like if the principle is, people should govern close, you know, the government should be closest to the people,

that is cities and towns, that's not states, and so not to say that states are important, they're important, but it shouldn't be the case that cities get so constricted when what they're trying to do are the very basic, deliver the very basic things

that people need for quality of life, and for life in many cases, for educating your kids, for, you know, parks, like all the stuff that really makes up our quality of life. So all of which is to say that I hope that this smart folks

who are, you know, rethinking what comes next are thinking about that. - In those situations, I wanted to ask you about a strategy that some mayors may take that was not mentioned in your foreign affairs piece, a situation in which

a mayor takes a more real quality stance and plays nice with an autocrat in the hopes that some of these funds will go unblocked or that they can just deliver services better to their constituents.

You know, if a mayor is weighing that kind of calculus or strategy, what would you advise? You know, I'm thinking, you know, this isn't quite a perfect analogy, but Mayor Zornon Dani's sort of secret,

while, you know, many people back home

would be angry that he was maybe giving a rubber stamp some of the immigration enforcement policies, et cetera. So what do you make of that kind of, you know, just real, quality strategy that some mayors may think about? - I mean, every mayor has to make the judgment

for themselves what they're gonna do. You know, you have mayors in red states that are, that's a different scenario than when you've got mayors in blue states, it tends to be that red states tend to wanna curb

city actions more than blue states do, just as a generality. I'm haven't proven that,

“but that's what it seems like in at least anecdotally.”

But I will maybe repeat the words of the mayor of Budapest but I extra vast this question. I was like, so what would you advise US mayors? And he said, he sort of said, well, I'm really happy that I hung on

and I'm really happy that I never caved.

And Jacob Fry would say something, it has said similar things, like they're coming for all of us, you know, don't think you can duck. On the other hand, I would think that if, again, like the mayor knows best and the city knows best,

what they're gonna try to do, maybe it's a tactic they try, you know, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but I certainly wouldn't fault anyone for trying hard. I will say we haven't really talked about the international solidarity aspects of this,

that there is this network called the Pact of Free Cities

“that was started by the Visigrad for capital cities.”

So Budapest, Warsaw, Rada Slava, and Prague started this, just with the four of them started this Pact of Solidarity, Pact of Free Cities, where they could share lessons about how they were being defunded or attacked or whatnot. They eventually invited more cities to join with them.

And when I was deputy mayor of Los Angeles, Los Angeles joined, but it's mostly European, European, you know, London Paris, but also, like Amsterdam, but also Kiev and Zagreb and Sophia. And then this year, 10 American cities joined.

My organization allies, the Alliance for Local Leaders International recruited 10 American cities across the country to join this network that promotes rule of law and individual freedoms and democracy. And we've become the strategic partner, allies has.

And there is now a little bit of a leadership structure. And so we'll see, you know, what is to come with that organization, but I have a lot of, it's very exciting to me that it exists. It was a space that wasn't filled before.

And so now there is a way for mayors to collaborate across borders on these, you know, fundamental freedoms. - As we, you know, turn to the clothes here, I did want to dig into some of these strategies, both learned from these international,

solidaristic arrangements of the sharing of best practices between mayors who have been through this before or been through worse. But also this domestic solidarity between mayors within the United States,

you dug into some of these pretty interesting examples to the end of your piece, but specifically, when we talk about the sharing of best practices, what are some of the most compelling practices that you've heard about or, you know, asked mayors about?

“- Well, I think the legal strategies important.”

I mean, I think that kind of pushing back which many cities have done,

I think that's pretty critical.

That's just how our system works. It's not in the case in every country, but, you know, mayors and states are using it, I think pretty effectively, getting a lot of, you know, judgments in their favor.

So that's one, using humor. And I think is effective and, you know, in these times, like, it's nice to laugh. So like the mayor of Portland, you know, I think our president called,

called Portland, like, war ravaged. And so he started a social media campaign, like hashtag war ravaged Portland with these, like, idyllic pictures of the city and his residents joined in. So I think that's a pretty good one.

And then making sure that your residents are with you, that they know their rights, that they understand their rights to protest and their rights to peaceful civil discourse and that they are, you know, understanding or with you

the city, you as the mayor think is appropriate. That's something that the mayor of Budapest did.

He was always in touch with,

through pulling of his people to kind of understand, like, okay, we're not gonna pay this tax because if we did, you wouldn't get your, you know, your water turned on, your water would be turned off, but is, you know, are you okay with that kind of thing?

“So I think that would be another, like, important, you know,”

strategy. And then, you know, just collectively speaking troop to power, the U.S. conference and mayors has issued a number of statements about tariffs, but also after, you know, manyapolis, very bipartisan group,

you know, who said this chaos has to stop. And I think that, you know, that kind of collective

powerful messaging is, is important.

They did, they had another statement around a group of mayors, had another statement around this federal rule that would say that a political appointee can decide whether or not to issue federal grants to cities and states. I mean, that would be really devastating.

It thought rule came to pass. And so cities and states are mobilized to try to defeat that. So yeah, you had mentioned in the piece, some of these creative reforms to tax codes that allow cities and municipalities to own more and disperse more of the funds that they generate

through tax levies, things like that.

“Yeah, I think you're referring to Poland.”

That happened at the national level. After solidarity movement, I don't know exactly the history of how it happened, but it was written in national law that cities get to keep a percentage of the income tax that they generate. And so that enabled Warsaw, which is both a city and a county.

So it got, you know, to keep about half of its income tax, which made it a much stronger city than Budfest, which did not have that law at the national level. So I think some kind of guarantee that cities are funded to the basic services that they provide.

I think we'll be, I would recommend that to any national government that is so inclined. Now before we actually come to a close here, I do want to pause and open it up. Is there anything else I should have asked you or anything else you wanted to close on before we do so?

Yeah, I'll say one thing I suppose that is worth knowing. Mayors are trusted by about 70% of the population versus the federal government, which is somewhere between 30 and 40%. And that makes them also really, you know, powerful political actors. And they, I think they get that trust because they're, you know,

as the mayor of Chattanooga says, like mayors have to eat their own cookie. Like they're in the neighborhoods, they live in the city. You can bump into them at the grocery store. And they're responsive. The time from, you know, request to response is much shorter than it would be, you know, at the national level or the state level.

“So yeah, I think that's another reason why they are, you know, an important part of democracy.”

Well, I don't have super granular audience data, but I think it's safe to assume that many of the most of our listeners are urban dwelling people. So on behalf of the many 80% of Americans. There you go. And you know, a lot of our global listeners too, I imagine our city dwellers. So this will be a very relevant conversation to most people who are listening. So I really want to thank you for joining me today, Ambassador.

My pleasure. And if you are, you know, depressed about the state of democracy, go help your mayor. The aftermath and escalation, our latest law fair presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine. You can also find all of our written work at law fairmedia.org. The podcast is edited by Jen Patia, with audio engineering by No Mausband of Go Brodio.

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