In this year of elections, when a full quarter of humanity was eligible to vote, pessimism about the fate of democracy has spread among politicians, civil society, media commentators and political scientists. The victory of Donald Trump on Wednesday, with his demagogy and verbal assaults on what he referred to as “enemies from within,” makes the assessment that democracy is in retreat seem all the more plausible.
Even before the U.S. election, liberal thinkers in America and other Western nations warned of a relapse into authoritarianism around the world — or even the coming of a new wave of fascism. Political scientists have spoken darkly of the erosion of civil liberties and democratic institutions known as “democratic backsliding,” the decrease in the number of democratic governments globally and the rise of autocrats.
Some election results this year fit into this gloomy picture, including America’s. In Indonesia, voters elected the former right-hand man of a longtime dictator who is accused of overseeing gross human rights abuses. In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele, whose tough-on-crime government has hobbled his political opposition, handily won a second term in February.
Radical right-wing parties made important gains in eastern Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. In France, while the far-right National Rally came in third in parliamentary elections, it nevertheless made record inroads with voters and the party’s popular former leader Marine Le Pen has a good chance of being elected president in 2027.
However worrying, these developments are not harbingers of a global domino effect that will override electoral procedures and break down constitutional barriers. In fact, by many measures, the health of elections is quite robust around the world.
Before this year of record voting, the number of changes of government brought about by elections had been stable over the past two decades, according to recent research. Nor was there any significant evidence of a decline in electoral competition, the researchers found. If democracy was already backsliding, as many worried when the election year kicked off, then we should have already been able to observe incumbents staying in power and electoral competition declining. But we did not.
Several important recent elections support this view. In Brazil, voters rejected the incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro, an authoritarian strongman, in 2022, putting the left-wing Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva back in power. The defeat of Poland’s Law and Justice party, which many viewed as having autocratic leanings, in last fall’s elections is another example of the electoral mechanism at work in a part of the world many worry democracy is at risk.
In India, the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was forced into a coalition after it lost its outright majority in Parliament. The same happened in South Africa, where the African National Congress lost the majority it had held for 30 years.
It’s also worth mentioning that in many nations, the spectrum of parties is widening and in some places, more people are voting. In Germany, which has long been characterized by a relatively narrow range of parties, their number has multiplied and the relatively low participation in elections, which political scientists long considered to be problematic, has also risen. This was particularly impressive in state elections in eastern Germany. While voter turnout there was around 55 percent 20 years ago, it shot up to almost 75 percent in the election in September. You can certainly accuse the so-called right-wing populists who benefited from this turnout of many things, but not of discouraging people from going to the polls.
What, then, is behind the prevailing pessimism and the impression that democracy could be coming to an end?
First, we are in a period of transition, in which liberalism’s core tenets are losing their credibility. As a result, principles such as freedom of speech, freedom of movement and free trade are increasingly being rejected or sidelined, even in societies that claim to be liberal. At the same time, the liberal international order — with its key projects of fostering international institutions, spreading liberal norms and accelerating capitalist globalization under the hegemony of the United States — is quickly eroding.
Since both the Western liberal commentariat and a significant number of political scientists are supporters of those principles and projects, it’s plausible that they experience these developments as a period of decline — and even crisis. If liberalism fails, they assume, democracy will too. This can be illustrated by the thinking of Francis Fukuyama, who argued at the beginning of the 1990s that the “end of history” could come about because liberalism’s triumph might bring peace, prosperity, and democracy to all. More recently, he has been of the opinion that liberal democracy is in crisis and in dire need of defense.
The weakening of this long-dominant ideology represents an opportunity for political contenders often described as populists, though they hardly resemble the original movement bearing that name. But because liberals tend to conflate liberalism with democracy, they consider it indisputable that the parties and politicians from this new camp are undemocratic. Mr. Trump’s disdain for the principle that giving up office after losing an election is part of democracy seems to be a case in point.
But not all of the so-called populists who have gained support over the past year have run on an openly anti-democratic program. In fact, many of them demand more direct democracy. And sometimes things are more complicated than they seem at first glance: For instance, the German Alternative for Germany party is prone to radical right-wing activism but at the same time also displays a surprisingly high level of internal democratic decision making.
There are other reasons right-wing populist parties are making inroads, of course. Their retrograde political program suggests that the solutions to the problems of the present — inflation, housing shortages, unemployment, crime — lie in the past, which must be brought back to life. When a society’s outlook is bleak, formerly dominant political recipes seem exhausted, and the state of things no longer seem sustainable to voters. Politicians who peddle visions of an idealized functional past often gain support.
Yet there is no question that pessimism among voters about the effectiveness of democracy, despite the flourishing of elections, is growing. In one 2023 poll, most respondents said that it is important to live in a democracy. But dissatisfaction with the actual workings of democratic systems is rising. Although participation in elections has increased, trust in parties, politicians and public administration hasn’t.
In some countries, including France and the Netherlands, both of which saw populist parties make major gains this year, just about half of respondents said they believe that their country is democratic. In another survey in Germany, only a quarter of respondents believed that the state is capable of fulfilling its tasks and solving its problems.
Americans, too, are no longer sure democracy serves them: In a late October New York Times/Siena College poll of likely voters, nearly half said that American democracy does not do a good job of representing the people.
All of these figures reflect the fact that democracies are performing poorly both in solving public problems and in responding to ordinary citizens’ concerns and interests. It is important that governments can be voted out of office, and so far, most citizens agree with that proposition. But they also expect more than that, and these expectations are increasingly being disappointed. This is most clearly demonstrated by the fact that political influence is unevenly distributed: decision making in democracies is dominated by the interests of economic elites and the upper classes. That is why fewer citizens believe that the current crop of democratic parties and politicians can or wants to solve the central problems of our time.
The democratic creed consists of the belief that ordinary citizens can influence political life. It holds that even though the big players call the shots, regular people also have their share of influence — or at least will in the future. The current disenchantment with democracy in many Western countries stems from this once popular belief becoming detached from reality for a growing proportion of citizens. Although they adhere to the ideal of democracy, they cannot imagine how the reality of the system they live in could come any closer to it.
If this gap between norm and reality widens in the future, democratic systems will appear like institutional hypocrites. What is often said about communism could then also one day apply to democracy: It may be a good idea, but unfortunately it doesn’t work in practice.
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