In the Philippines, voters recently elected the son of a former dictator to succeed Rodrigo Duterte, who during his six years as president cracked down on the news media and launched a war on drugs that led to thousands of killings. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, elected in 2014, has presided over a sharp rise in Hindu nationalism - with violent, frequently deadly consequences for the country’s Muslim minority - and a stifled speech environment. To varying degrees, the decline of liberal democratic norms and institutions is visible in almost every region: In the process, he has become a model to the far right around the world, including in the US. After being voted into power in 2010, he has worked to build what he calls an “illiberal democracy” by eroding civil liberties and media freedom, subjugating the judiciary, and restructuring his country’s electoral system. In Europe, the most prominent practitioner of this kind of “soft autocracy” by election is Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. (The share of the world population living in liberal democracies also fell in the last decade, to 13% from 18%.)Īs The Times’s Amanda Taub has explained, this recent democratic decline - which some scholars say constitutes “a third wave of autocratisation,” the first having begun in the 1920s and the second in the 1960s - has been primarily driven not by coups or revolutions, but by the actions of legitimately elected officials. Today, only 34 liberal democracies exist, down to the same number as in 1995, according to V-Dem. Some political scientists divide democracy’s progression into three waves: the first beginning in the 19th century the second beginning in the aftermath of World War II and the third beginning in the mid-1970s, which crested with 42 liberal democracies, a record high, in 2012. What explains the global resurgence of authoritarian politics, and what does it portend for the future of democracy?ĭemocracy’s spread over the past few centuries has rarely been linear, instead ebbing and flowing with the competing forces of autocracy. According to data from V-Dem, a monitoring institute based in Sweden - where, as it happens, a far-right party with roots in neo-Nazism made a strong electoral showing two weeks ago - more democracies were deteriorating, and even slipping into autocracy, in 2021 than at any point in the past 50 years. If such language sounds familiar now, it’s because countries around the world, including the US, are confronting what experts say is a worldwide wave of democratic backsliding. “Today is a sad day for Italy,” said the leader of Italy’s center-left Democratic Party, who during the campaign had cast the contest as nothing less than a fight to save the country’s democracy. Last weekend, voters in Italy handed the reins of government to a coalition led by a party directly descended from Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship, delivering one of the biggest victories to the far right in Europe since World War II.
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