Democracy, it is often heard these days, is in crisis.
The election of Donald Trump and news of political turmoil in many other democracies has created the impression that liberal democracy is everywhere in retreat in the face of authoritarians feeding on discontent over economic woes, rapid social change, mass migration, disinformation and general malaise.
Austria could get its first far-right chancellor since World War II. France is on its fifth prime minister in three years, Germany is headed for elections the chancellor is sure to lose, the deeply unpopular Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada quit under pressure from his own party, a post-fascist government runs Italy, Viktor Orban of Hungary continues to proudly stomp on democracy, and populist parties seem to be making inroads in every corner of Europe. Elsewhere there’s always more troubling news — from Israel, India, South Korea.
It’s easy to perceive a global trend: workers of the world losing faith in the established order and dismayed by globalization, rushing for the extremes and rallying behind populists.
“It is hard to travel in Europe these days, or even to live in Washington, without recognizing that liberal democracy is now in serious trouble in the world,” a Times columnist once wrote in these pages. “We are living in a time of widespread doubt about the capacity of free societies to deal with the economic, political and philosophical problems of the age.”
Many readers would agree. In fact, many did in June 1975, almost a half century ago, when James Reston wrote those words. But democracy did not founder then, and while there is no question that it is facing serious challenges today, it is another question whether they amount to a universal democratic backsliding or worse: liberal democracy in danger of collapse.
But as The Times’s Berlin bureau chief Jim Tankersley suggested in a recent analysis of Germany’s plight, “not all malaise is the same.” Popular discontent in Western democracies may have broadly similar sources, but the political consequences are as different as the leaders and systems in each country. And it is ultimately leaders who shape the outcomes, argues Larry M. Bartels, the author of “Democracy Erodes From the Top.” Public opinion, he suggests, is less an active wave than a passive reservoir to which leaders respond — or which the less principled exploit. “I think there’s always a tendency on the part of observers to see deep meaning in terms of shifts in public opinion,” Mr. Bartels said in an interview. “It turns out that it’s more country-specific than outside observers are likely to grant.”
Scanning the global political storms separately reveals their unique characteristics and challenges, and the way many are rooted more in a backlash against incumbent leaders than in a new embrace of the far right.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron was first elected in 2017, determined to upend French politics, and so they’re upended. And if Marine Le Pen, the perennial far-right contender, has made inroads, it arguably owes as much to her success in detoxifying her National Rally party as to a growth of far-right sentiment. In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party finished first in elections on Sept. 29 in a reaction against the mainstream parties, but it also had to moderate its tone to get there, and it may yet fail to find the coalition parties it needs to form a government.
In Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s decline reflects the failure of the three-party coalition he led to cope with the country’s economic funk. But that’s politics, not democratic backsliding, and the much-feared, far-right Alternative for Germany remains officially branded as “suspected extremist” and shunned as a potential federal ruling coalition partner by all major parties. Up in Canada, voters largely grew tired of Mr. Trudeau and his progressive politics after nearly a decade.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy, once feared as an ultranationalist, has managed to establish herself since her election in 2022 as someone with whom Europe, and now, even more, America, can do business. Mr. Orbán, today the poster-boy of illiberalism, was far less radical when he first came to power in 1998, and changed his stripes in the confusion of post-Communist power struggles. At the same time, Poland, once twinned with Hungary as a study in democracy gone awry, ousted the conservative nationalist Law and Justice party and brought back the centrist Donald Tusk.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s politics in Israel, and Narendra Modi’s in India, have less to do with discontent than with distinctly national factors. And in South Korea, the efforts to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol after his aborted bid for emergency powers can actually be chalked up as a victory for — not a blow to — democracy.
The roots and dangers of each of these cases can be disputed, and collectively they do represent a swing away from progressive politics. But to view them as a broad democratic retreat is to limit the historical horizon to the era since the collapse of the Soviet empire, an event that briefly fueled illusions of liberal democracy’s final and irreversible triumph: an “end of history.” In fact, democracy has been sorely challenged throughout its history.
“If compared to the 1990s, then yes, things are getting worse,” said Liana Fix, an expert on Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations. But looking back as a historian over the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, she said, “The picture looks quite different. So what is the benchmark? Yes, globalization doesn’t hold the same promise it did in the ’90s, and we’re back in a more contentious age, but the era of liberal democracy is not over.”
The history of the United States — the lodestar of modern democracies — is hardly one of unity and harmony until the rise of Trumpism. The country has endured repeated crises, Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman write in their book, “Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy.” In each one “political combat escalated to a point where Americans feared that the government might collapse, that the Union might dissolve, or that unrest, violence, or even civil war might break out.” Some of which, of course, did happen.
That does not mean there’s nothing to worry about in America today. On the contrary, Ms. Mettler and Mr. Lieberman see a serious danger to the United States in the current confluence of the four recurring threats they identify: polarization, tribalism, economic inequality and excessive executive power.
But if the second election of Mr. Trump does hearten authoritarians abroad, that does not mean the malaise they thrive on in their countries is the same as the malaise in the United States. While right-wing movements on both sides of the Atlantic bash immigrants, the context is often quite different. Mr. Bartels, who is co-director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt, said that despite the rhetoric of far-right politicians, polls showed that Europeans are more favorable to immigration today than they were 20 or 25 years ago. Similarly, the culture wars in Europe are far less pronounced than in the United States, Ms. Fix noted.
That the threats to democracy are diverse may not be a great consolation to those worried about where it is headed, and there’s every reason to remain vigilant. But it should be reassuring that democracy is not facing a global extinction event but more a patchwork of storms, and that democracies have usually found a way to weather them.
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