What’s the English for “democrature”, a dictatorship pretending to be a democracy through fraudulent elections?

Solution 1:

The term Potemkin democracy has been used in English for governments that would be called democratures in French.

The English phrase Potemkin democracy means a system of government which is designed to look like a democracy to the outside observer, but which is really not one. It's not anywhere near as common as démocrature is in French. (See Ngrams.)

Etymologically, this comes from the phrase Potemkin village, which Merriam-Webster defines as:

an impressive facade or show designed to hide an undesirable fact or condition,

and is named after Grigory Potemkin, who supposedly built show villages along the routes that Catherine the Great was scheduled to travel on.

Solution 2:

Naturally, nobody can prove the absence of a word from all dictionaries, if you mean that there has to be a word with the same ending as 'dictatorship' or 'legislature'.

But the answer is that there is no such word.

So the question is what word can be made up to do the same job as democratura in Italian and the cognate démocrature in French.

What is being talked about is a new (or seemingly new) idea: democratic forms retained to disguise what is really a dictatorship. Actually, it is not as new as you might think. But that is another story.

There is nothing wrong with using the equivalent English word, 'democrature'. Not least, many of the arguments about this modern phenomenon concern how it should be defined. So it would be a matter for political science and philosophy rather than for semantics and lexicography.

At the moment, if it is used, its first instance in a book or paper should be in 'scare quotes' to signal a neologism (or at least unfamiliar word), and carefully defined for the purpose of the paper itself, so that readers know what the author has in mind.

Solution 3:

The term illiberal democracy, first used in an article by Fareed Zakaria, comes quite close to capturing the meaning of democrature

a governing system in which, although elections take place, citizens are cut off from knowledge about the activities of those who exercise real power because of the lack of civil liberties; thus it is not an open society.

With regards to elections

Elections in an illiberal democracy are often manipulated or rigged, being used to legitimize and consolidate the incumbent rather than to choose the country's leaders and policies.

While an illiberal democracy is not necessarily a dictatorship, it does have many of the same characteristics.

The word illiberal is used here in the meaning of

limiting freedom of expression, thought, behaviour, etc.

which ties into the definition above, of a government holding apparently free and fair elections, but not really, since the populace does not have the necessary information to cast an informed vote.

Solution 4:

According to the Swedish Wikipedia article for demokratur the corresponding English term is democratorship (something that is lead by a democrator).

Interestingly, according to the Wikipedia articles in languages I understand (German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, French, Danish), the oldest usage of the word listed is a Swedish newspaper, 1938.