They're making excuses for this stuff because the wording used around it in this comment thread has been quite hysterical. For all the problems plaguing modern democracies, leadership elections are not one of them. In representative democracies, the leader of the party isn't god like how a president is in non-parliamentary systems. The role has some additional powers, but it doesn't get its own branch of government. Most importantly, party leaders are still MPs who were democratically elected by their constituents - the party leader designation is an internal role. You can even affect it by becoming a party member in most cases. This is incredibly mundane stuff that has existed for decades to centuries, so people here immediately jumping in to talk about China or say that this is somehow worse than Trump just seems like enraged flailing in an attempt to portray many other democracies not being exactly like the US as horrific injustice.