Hugo Chavez was no Stalin. He was about as horrible as your average South American populist, whether from the left or the right.

Anyway he is an outlier. All other elected socialists have respected democracy or even advanced it. And there has been socialists elected into government all over the world since the 1930s. In the Nordics we have in several countries had self declared socialists running countries all the way until the 1980s.

The ones who have instituted dictatorships have not won elections. They have been communist revolutionaries. Stalin never won an election, neither did Mao or Pol Pot. Equating them with democratic socialists is dishonest or ignorant.

However Fascists have won repeatedly destroyed democracies: Franco in Spain, Mussolini, Japanese Fascists and of course Hitler which by his own words was not a socialist, nor by actions.

You cannot just label whatever you don’t like socialism, while forgetting decades of rule by socialists all over Western Europe: France, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Nordics etc.