You say after yet another free and fair election where opposition leaders were neither jailed nor assassinated Democracy in the US might limp along?
Don't buy the Kool-Aid.
Don't buy the Kool-Aid.
(It occurred to me that if English is not your first language, then maybe you don't know what the phrase "fighting chance" means.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fight... )
(Or it could be sarcasm, with a problem being that some people actually believe it)
-- Out to the wings where your insinuation lives:
In the US, not only were there gatherings called "No Kings" (and apparently without any sense of irony, one outside a US embassy in Great Britain, which was currently ruled by King Charles III), there were people who were absolutely certain that Trump would not allow elections in November or if he did that the elections would be rigged and if the Republicans still somehow lost they somehow would not seat the incoming Representatives. You'll have to look in the wingnut areas to find it, but if we're were talking about "fighting chances" for US democracy, that's where you live so it shouldn't be hard.
Btw, the two most recent times I' m aware of where a political party in the US has chosen its candidate for the general election by ignoring the popular vote in the party's election process were by the Democratic Party. Maybe that's what you're referring to in the "fighting chance"?
It is still not apposite because the general election is still "by the people" and just because, for example, the people of Maine did not select the Democratic Party's candidate on the general election ballot for Senator does not mean the people could not have voted for the same person they did in the Party's primary by write-in vote.
--
Back out of the wings, The US Constitution explicitly requires that both US Representatives and Senators must be chosen "by the people" and that the the people doing the choosing must be the same set that are allowed to choose Representatives in the State legislature and further requires that those people be broadly selected.
In no State of the Union was attempt made that I'm aware of to modify the qualifications of the people allowed to vote to restrict them further than they were in 2022 or even 2002.
--
Choosing the members of the House and Senate in the United States by popular vote in each State is not a feature of the United States political system that has ever had a serious threat (and the people allowed to do the voting has generally only expanded, with the exception of the 1996 law that excluded "aliens" [whether of terrestrial or extraterrestrial origin] from voting in federal elections)
--
Perhaps you can see why I left my first comment shorter