The country’s media is largely now a factory producing pro-Orban content. He now talks about Hungary’s “system of national cooperation,” a process that has hobbled the court system, re-written the constitution and given immense power to himself and his party. Orban, the nationalist Hungarian prime minister who returned to power in the wake of the financial crisis, feeding on an electorate that distrusted the traditional elite, spoke proudly of leading an “illiberal democracy.” Today, a man like Viktor Orban can look very attractive to many voters. And the opposite is also true.įrustration has grown, with a 2019 Pew Research Center survey of 34 countries showing a median of 64% of people believing elected officials don’t care about them. and Europe looks, the better that is for the folks fighting for democracy,” said Berman. Those financial troubles, combined later with the political firestorms of the Trump administration and years of angry negotiations over Britain’s exit from the European Union, made liberal democracy look risky. In the European Union, America’s troubles helped lead to a debt crisis that sucked in Greece, Ireland and other nations that needed outside economic bailouts. In the U.S., banks teetered on the verge of collapse and top officials worried about another Great Depression. Then came the financial crisis of 2007-2008, which began in the U.S. A plunging standard of living, a weak leader in Boris Yeltsin, thug businessmen and budding oligarchs fighting for control of state-owned businesses opened the way for Vladimir Putin. Russia’s experiment with democracy, for example, was short lived after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hard times and turmoil are mother’s milk for authoritarians. Both are very poor, with little history of democracy. It’s the beginning.”Īs a result, many scholars aren’t too surprised when countries like Nicaragua or Myanmar stumble into authoritarianism. “Getting rid of the dictators is not the end. “It takes a lot to make democracy work,” said Berman. “It seemed that liberal democracy was the way of the future.”īut within just a few years the cracks began to show. It was unparalleled,” said Sheri Berman, a political science professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. “We had the largest number of democracies that ever existed in the world. A wave of democratization swept across Africa, from South Africa to Nigeria to Ghana. In Latin America, decades of military dictatorships gave way to elected governments. Eastern European nations that had long been controlled by Moscow became independent. The Soviet Union collapsed amid Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts at political and economic reform. The late 20th and early 21st centuries saw country after country transition to democratic rule. “Can the democracies rally to push back against this authoritarian tide that we’ve seen resurgent?” “It’s an open question if we as a democratic grouping can push back against the Russias or the Chinas of the world and `win’ the 21st century,” said Torrey Taussig, a scholar of authoritarianism and great power politics at the Harvard Kennedy School. “The world is still more democratic than it was in the 1970s and 1980s, but the global decline in liberal democracy has been steep during the past 10 years.”Ĭountries like Sweden, Germany and the United States can seem like democratic outliers in a world increasingly dominated by authoritarian leaders. The backsliding of democracy, though, goes back far before 2021, with a long string of countries where democratic rule has been abandoned or dialed back, or where democratically elected leaders now make no secret of their authoritarianism.Ģ020 was “another year of decline for liberal democracy,” said a recent report from the V-Dem Institute, a Sweden-based research center. “Why does it have to end up like this?” asked an Apple Daily graphic designer, Dickson Ng. In mid-June, Hong Kong’s last remaining pro-democracy newspaper shut down operations after police froze $2.3 million of its assets and arrested five top editors and executives, accusing them of foreign collusion. 1 and more than 4,800 arbitrarily detained a tightening grip by Beijing on Hong Kong, the semi-autonomous enclave where activists and journalists have been harassed and imprisoned under a sweeping national security law. The list is grim: a draconian crackdown in Nicaragua, with laws that now let the government paint nearly any critic as a traitor a military takeover in Myanmar, with bloody repression that the United Nations says has left more than 850 people dead since Feb. In the last few months, the growing ranks of dictators have flexed their muscles, and freedom has been in retreat. “The end of the dictatorship is close.”īut history - at least recent history - is not on Torres’ side. “History is on our side,” Torres said in the video, which was quickly uploaded onto social media.
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