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Can liberal democracy survive? Yes, actually.

The fear and angst in western democracies is palpable. The threat from populists of the right is serious. But the reasons driving all this aren’t the ones you’ve been told.

Of the 193 member states of the United Nations, just 24 are 'full democracies'

When time flipped from one millennium to the next and a new century began, the future of liberal democracy seemed assured.

Eight years and one week earlier, the Soviet Union had formally ceased to exist. The Cold War, which for sixty years had threatened nuclear catastrophe, was over. Almost half of the world’s people were now living in countries classified as “liberal” or “elective” democracies.

Twelve months and twenty days into the new century, George W Bush replaced Bill Clinton in the White House. Then, twenty-one months in, religious maniacs crashed two airliners into the World Trade Centre in New York and another into the Pentagon, just outside Washington DC.

America, hubristic and triumphalist, started disastrous wars of vengeance in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which it would lose. The idea that democracy could be imposed at the point of a gun died, along with millions of people.

And so the airy visions of a new age of peace under the benign guidance of an unchallengeable United States were shown to be fantasies. The new century was not to be like that after all.

Crisis followed crisis: climate change, the Global Financial Crisis, the Covid pandemic, Britain’s retreat from the European Union, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Xi Jinping’s brutality in Hong Kong and the threat of war over Taiwan, trade wars, Russia’s descent into aggression abroad and repression at home.

Now, liberal democracy is in trouble. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s democracy index, the United States, which was once seen as a beacon, has been downgraded to the status of “flawed democracy”. Only 24 nations are classified as full democracies; another 50, including the US, are flawed democracies; 33 are hybrid regimes like Hong Kong and Turkey, with only vestiges of political and social freedom remaining; and 58 are “authoritarian”, with no pretence of freedom.

Almost everywhere, democracies are backsliding and authoritarians extend their suppressive rule.

What happened to those ardent expectations that seemed, not so long ago, to be within our grasp? Are they gone forever? Or is there a rational basis for hope?

An examination of what’s causing the pervasive sense of democratic angst – and what is not causing it – shows that the way back may already have begun. Optimism is permitted.

The drivers of dysfunction

The times are out of joint. Throughout most of the western liberal democracies, trepidation rules. The moderate Left is weak and in disarray; the moderate Centre Right is outflanked or captured by populist demagogues from the hard right and far right: Trump, Le Pen, Wilders, Netanyahu, Johnson, Dutton.

In the background is the promise of destruction: climate change, Putin, Xi, Ukraine, Gaza. In the foreground are cost of living, housing, unaffordable and inadequate healthcare, fears about personal safety.

Lines from W.B. Yeats’s apocalyptic poem The Second Coming are being quoted in newspaper columns:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Millions of ordinary people feel so alienated, so detached from those with power, that they just want to blow the place up. And so they turn to far-right populists who proffer ringing and simple answers to intractable problems that can only be resolved, if at all, by time and careful wisdom.

The times are out of joint: but they usually are.

Yeats published that poem in 1919, just after the worst war humanity had ever endured, but which presaged the most appalling half-century in the whole of modern history. It continues:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Fear of the apocalypse comes in waves. Occasionally, something very close to that happens: in 1914, political madness and diplomatic incompetence led the world into the first world war (20 million deaths), the second world war (75 million deaths) and the depression (economic collapse and social wreckage on an almost unprecedented scale).

Between the late 1940s and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a Cold War threatened – and, several times, almost delivered – nuclear Armageddon. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 is today all but forgotten, but it could have killed us all.

Despite the current pervasive sense of angst in western liberal democracies, we face nothing like that today. That does not mean the challenges are not serious and the risks immense. Of course they are. But our situation, now, is not out of control. It can be managed. But to manage successfully in a period of conflict, polarisation and pessimism, we must first understand what is going on.

What are the drivers of our predicament? What is the prognosis for those? By identifying and examining those drivers we can, perhaps, discover our future and take control of our fate.

Many factors are at play at every pivot-point of history, such as the one we are now living through. But three stand out: the national and global economies; social and economic inequalities; and mass migration.

And we can look at the impact of these in particular settings: in this case, in eight western nations, in all of which these three factors are at play. The eight are Australia, Britain, the United States, Denmark, France, Hungary, Germany and Italy.

The paradox of economic growth

It has never been true that a rising tide lifts all boats, but it at least gives them a chance. A spluttering economy that flatlines or falls will leave millions going backwards – or, more often, feeling as if they are.

So far this century, the world has had to deal with two major shocks: the Global Financial Crisis and the pandemic-induced recession. Of all the developed economies on our list, Australia has fared the best, suffering a comparatively mild downturn in 2020 and missing out on the “Great Recession” altogether. By 2022, when the pandemic had receded, Australia’s per-capita economic output had grown by 33% in inflation-adjusted terms, equal to the 27-nation European Union but well ahead of the others. Britain managed only 23%.

The EU’s apparently strong result was boosted by swift growth in the newly-admitted nations of eastern Europe. The core did less well. Over 23 years, Germany improved by 26%, Denmark by 23% and France by only 17%. Long-term real growth averaging less than 1% a year is hardly stellar performance.

Though starting from an admittedly low base, Hungary’s rise of 82% for the period shows how much better the former centrally-planned communist nations of eastern Europe performed when they embraced capitalism and joined the EU. Italy is at the other end of the scale, with no significant improvement at all since the beginning of the century and ending just 3% higher than in 2000.

In 2000, Hungary’s GDP per head was 55% lower than that of its neighbour, Italy; by 2022, it was only 20% lower.

This chart shows the relative performance of the eight nations, plus the EU. After Hungary, Australia’s growth was the strongest of them all.

Of the seven fully developed economies, the US leads the pack, as it always has. France, Italy and Hungary – for very different reasons – are at the other end. No country has actually gone backwards, but France and Italy have come uncomfortably close.

Broad economic conditions explain relatively little about the rise of far-right populism in Europe and America. The clearest correlation between populism and the economy is to be found in Italy and, to a lesser extent, in France. By itself, it does not explain the rise of the right and far-right in Germany and Denmark, nor the rush to Brexit and populism in Britain led by Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. It does not explain the allure of Donald Trump.

Nor does it explain the crippling polarisation of politics and society in many of these nations. We must look deeper.

Who gets what?

Political polarisation thrives when substantial sections of a national population feel left out. That has always been so: there has never been a time when everyone had a reasonable share of prosperity. But decades of globalisation have simultaneously boosted aggregate economic growth while wrecking the fortunes of swathes of formerly productive, prosperous communities.

This happened with the north of England under the de-industrialisation policies of Margaret Thatcher. It happened again in the United States, where one of the world’s manufacturing hubs in the country’s mid-west became a depressed rust belt, ripe for Donald Trump’s seductive fantasies.

The Gini coefficient is the most commonly used broad measure of inequality. The scale goes from zero (where everyone has an equal share) to 1 (where one person owns everything).

Of the eight nations we’re examining, income inequality has risen so far this century in all but two. The US was by far the most unequal in 2000 and is now much worse. But the biggest increase has been in Denmark.

In the EU, taken as a whole, has marginally fallen. And the increase in Hungary is typical of nations with fast-growing emergent economies.

When large parts of a population see, upon good evidence, that the benefits of economic activity are denied to them and instead flow to a very few powerful, privileged and rich people, anger and resentment are likely to follow.

Figures on the share of national income going to the top 1% versus the bottom 50% are a much more revealing measure of inequality than aggregate economic growth. All of these countries have an inequality problem but the United States, Denmark and Italy stand out. It is hardly coincidental that people in each of these three nations are susceptible to the promises of right-wing populist politicians.

Severe income inequality can be, to some extent, ameliorated by a progressive regime of taxes and benefits. In such a scheme, which is employed to various degrees by all eight nations, people earning more pay a higher percentage of their income in tax; and though nobody can entirely escape taxation, the poorest may pay very little.

For benefits, it is the other way around. Almost all of those elements of the “social wage”  – welfare payments, health programs, public education – accrue to those in the bottom half of the income hierarchy. France and Denmark redistribute more through their tax and benefits systems than the other countries on the list: around a third, against around a quarter.

But income is not the main part of the inequality story. Accumulated wealth accounts for a much greater share of a nation’s economy than income.

Even these numbers do not show the full extent of wealth inequality. In Australia, just two people – Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest – together hold as much wealth as the bottom 5.5 million Australians. In the US, it is even worse. In 2000, the richest 0.1% owned 148% more wealth than the bottom 50% of the population. By 2023, the gap had expanded to 429%: $US19 trillion for the richest 0.1% against $US3.6 trillion spread around 50% of the American population.

Reality check: unemployment, housing

There are many reasons for a sense of unease but it is difficult, from the available data, to see why people in many countries seem so much more susceptible than usual to conspiracy theories, generalised pessimism and the proffered solutions of right-wing populists and fabulists. The most obvious conclusion is that this palpable sense of unease is perhaps less about reality than about what we are being urged to believe.

Things are bad for some people in some places, but that’s all. Most people, most of the time, aren’t doing too badly.

Take employment. High and persistent unemployment can create massive social and political stress. Desperate people who feel they have little to lose are often prepared to try anything. But that’s not the situation now.

In each one of the eight countries we’ve been tracking, unemployment is low and heading lower. In most, it’s better than it has been at any time in the century so far.


There were obvious problems during the GFC, particularly in the US, Britain and Italy. Earlier, Germany had problems of its own but solved them with reforms of the labour market and other measures. Even in Italy and France, the rate of unemployment, which still far too high, is clearly heading downwards.

How can Hungary’s unemployment rate of 3.6% justify the continued rule of Victor Orbán? How can 3.1% in Germany explain Alternative für Deutschland?

Housing is a major problem almost everywhere, only partly as a result of central banks increasing interest rates to crush inflation. Data for the nations of the OECD show prices were increasing well before the pandemic. Average costs increased sharply for about two years from 2020 but then stabilised.

The impact of housing stress on the poorest 20% of national populations is real and harsh but – again – unevenly spread. The most serious impact is in the United States and Britain, where 49% of households in the lowest quintile are spending more than 40% of their income on rent.

These figures do not explain why the social and political angst in France, Italy and Hungary is so much worse than in Australia, Britain and Denmark.

According to the OECD’s housing experts, much more social housing needs to be provided.

“Total public investment in housing development alone was nearly cut by 90% between 2009 and 2016,” they write.

But they also say this:  “Since 2016, public investment in housing has slowly began increasing, despite remaining below the peak in 2009. Between 2016 and 2021, total public investment in housing and community amenities increased by roughly 40%.”

It’s a longer-term issue. In the three decades after World War 2, governments conducted huge social housing programs to accommodate those made homeless by wartime destruction and to alleviate the effects of poverty. When the welfare state went out of fashion in the 1970s, those programs were slashed, never to fully recover.

Although there’s little difference in the provision of social housing between the US, Australia, Hungary, Germany and Italy, it’s notable than in all of these eight countries other than France and the US, the proportion of social dwellings has shrunk as a proportion of all housing since 2010. That’s serious: it means that although more social housing has been provided, it has failed to keep pace with overall growth and demand from increasing populations.

The failure of trust

The sources of democratic dysfunction are less to be found in the factors usually cited – economic growth, employment or even inequality – than in the more nuanced elements of social function. The pervasive sense that things are going wrong can be found in the decline of social cohesion and trust of those in authority and of each other. Without that broad confidence and trust, no polity can function.

Social capital refers to all of these, rendered into a single metric. These figures, put together by the OECD from a multitude of sources, shows that between the end of the GFC and the end of the pandemic, social capital over the eight countries fell in all but two:
Denmark and Germany.

Local factors affected these results in all cases. The plunges in Denmark, Italy and France  between 2010 and 2015 coincides with disquiet over migrants from the Middle East. Australia fared well during the GFC but confidence fell during a period of political volatility and leadership churn. Hungary improved but its score remains below 50.

Trust in government is a key component of social capital. Not coincidentally, this measure closely follows the broader social capital index.

Widespread downgrading of civil rights is a cause and a symptom of social and political failures. Personal freedoms have declined within four of the eight countries: Denmark, France, and (more strikingly) Italy and Hungary. None of the countries has improved its civil rights score.

Cost-of-living is often cited as a fundamental cause of discontent. But the affordability of ordinary living costs is dependent not only on income but also on purchasing power. Hungarians earn less per head than Danes, Australians or Americans, but they are able to buy twice as much. Consumer price inflation has often outpaced wage growth across many countries in the past several years, but this is not a long-term trend. And it does not explain why Hungary, France, Germany and Italy are facing so much more political and social angst than Australia or Denmark.

Social isolation seems to be a better fit. According to OECD surveys, 16% of Hungarians do not have friends or relatives they can rely on. That’s three times the rate of Denmark and Australia.

Even so, the mood in Hungary seems brighter than it was at the turn of the century. Its happiness score is still the lowest of the eight nations but has shown marked improvement. This is in line with improved economic conditions.

A related measure, life satisfaction, shows similar results. Hungary retains the lowest score but has shown the greatest improvement. Germany’s mood improved slightly but all other countries – particularly the US – became gloomier.

People in all countries are less likely to trust those of a different background to themselves. Across all eight nations there are relatively high levels of trust for those we feel we know: our neighbours. But that trust is less likely to extend to those who are different to ourselves: people from another country or, particularly, people of another religion: in most cases, that religion is Islam.

Trust in journalism is one of the most serious and revealing indicator of the level of angst affecting democracies. If the basic traditional sources of information cannot be trusted, how can social and political cohesion thrive?

Those states with the least trust are those in which major elements of media are controlled by politically partisan owners (such as Rupert Murdoch and others in Britain and the US) or by government interference (as in Hungary).

The survey quoted here did not cover Denmark, so Sweden has been substituted. 'Don’t knows' are excluded.

Broadcast journalism attracts somewhat greater trust than print. The presence of non-partisan and independent publicly-funded broadcasters such as the BBC and ABC are critical to this increased confidence. But trust and truth do not always coincide: plenty of people in the United States trust Fox News.

All of these results are troubling, not only in France and Hungary. For a liberal democracy to function properly, the people must have high levels of confidence in the accuracy and probity of their sources of information. But the rates of high confidence shown in this and other surveys are disturbingly low; they are matched or exceeded by those with no confidence at all. If someone has zero trust in journalism, they are likely to turn to less orthodox sources. Populists and conspiracy theorists thrive under these conditions.

The vast majority if people in all these countries are deeply suspicious about journalism, reporting either lukewarm confidence (some trust) or significant misgivings (somewhat distrust). These results help to explain, in a way most of the commonly cited factors do not, the widespread erosion of confidence in democracy and in democratic governance.

Mass migration and its discontents

The waves of refugees and asylum seekers that have been unmatched since the end of the Second World War are a fundamental driver of democratic discontent and, along with pre-existing social disruption, explain much about the rise of the hard-right and far-right. Its impact has been magnified by terrorist attacks and crime levels that reflect on entire migrant communities, a factor eagerly exploited by the right-wing political opportunists.

The UN refugee agency estimates that at the end of 2023, 117.3 million people were forcibly displaced “as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order.”

Three quarters of those are living in low-to-middle-income countries, mostly neighbours to the nations from which they have fled. “Of the 117.3 million forcibly displaced people, an estimated 47 million (40 per cent) are children below 18 years of age,” the agency said. “Between 2018 and 2023, an average of 339,000 children were born as refugees per year,”

And 39% of the 117.3 million are hosted in just five countries: Iran, Turkey, Colombia, Germany and Pakistan. This is important: only one of the five is a western liberal democracy. Other western countries, with the exception of the United States, have comparatively low numbers – but in all of them, refugees and asylum seekers are a major and troubling political and social issue.

According to the UNHCR, people fleeing from Afghanistan and Syria head the list of displaced people. Next comes Venezuela, Ukraine and South Sudan.

In each case, by far the majority remain in the area. Of the 11. 5 million Afghans forcibly displaced, 4.8 million, or 42%, remain in Afghanistan. Of the rest, most are in two neighbouring countries: (Iran, 32%) and Pakistan (18%).

Germany has taken the largest number of any European nation – but that’s still only 2.6% of the total. Turkey has taken 1%. All other countries account for only 4.2% of all forcibly displaced Afghans.

It’s a similar story for Syrians. Even now, a decade after that exodus began, 78% of the 29.8 million people forcibly displaced remain in Syria. Germany has taken 2.6%. Most of the rest are in Turkey (10.8%), Lebanon (2.6%), Jordan (2.2%) and Iraq (0.9%).

All other countries account for just 2.8% of the total.

Of the 10.6 million Venezuelans displaced, 30% remain in that country. Only 5.1% have reached the United States. Almost all the rest are in other poor countries in South and Central America.

As a proportion of total populations in host western countries, refugees and asylum seekers remain relatively insignificant in all of the eight nations on our list, with the possible exception of Germany.

Migration from troubled countries to developed western democracies relieves only a tiny proportion of the problem but even these comparatively small numbers have resulted in substantial political and social disruption within the host nations.

Much of the unease and opposition to the migrants arises from the perceptions – and the reality – of crime. There is surprisingly little useful statistical information on the extent to which refugee and asylum seekers from particular nations commit crimes in their host nations. Overall crime statistics are not useful here: because these migrants comprise a small part of the total population, broad numbers of offences can be relatively low but the rates of offending by some groups may be, and sometimes are, very high.

The most notable study of the question was published by Statistics Denmark in 2014, before the two successive waves of movement to Europe from Syria and then from Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the study is revealing and disturbing.

People from the Middle East, Africa and southern Asia have very high rates of offending. People coming to Denmark from Lebanon (which includes many originating in Palestine) were more than three times as likely to be found guilty of a criminal offence as native Danes. Overall, Danish authorities have repeatedly found that migration from other western democracies reduces the crime rate; migration from the Middle East, Africa and southern Asia increases it.

These findings profoundly influenced Danish immigration policies. Under governments of the centre-right and the centre-left, Denmark has pursued some of Europe’s toughest immigration regimes. They have been criticised abroad but are so popular domestically that there seems little likelihood of any relaxation. Rather, further toughening is probable.

“In 2021,” reported Politico recently, “the country passed a law that could allow refugees arriving in Denmark to be moved to asylum centres in partner countries, such as Rwanda, a proposal which the European Commission criticised. It also looked hard at detaining asylum seekers on a remote island.

“[The former centre-right government] introduced nearly two dozen ‘ghetto laws,’ classifying more than two dozen immigrant-heavy communities as ‘ghettos.’ Children born to immigrants would be forced to assimilate into Danish society through mandated 25 hours of separation from their parents. One of these laws mandates forced integration of thousands of residents in these two dozen neighbourhoods by demolishing housing blocks.”

These laws were not only embraced but extended by the Social Democrat government which took power in 2019. And though other countries in Europe initially criticised this approach, they have increasingly adopted similar tough measures of their own.

Statistical agencies in other countries do not seem to have conducted similar investigations, but the absence of reliable data has provided far-right activists and populist politicians with an opportunity to invent their own supposed reality.

Migrant crime rates are driven by many factors including poverty, inability to speak the language, unemployment and poor education. One study found crime rates in Germany increased a year after arrival and particularly involved property and violent crimes. It found that while the crime rate per refugee was small, the collective impact was large.

But a clash of cultures can also be heavily implicated. Many of these migrants come from highly conservative religious backgrounds with attitudes to (for instance) women and homosexuality. And these factors can produce troubling incidents that do not appear in the crime statistics.

One which did appear was an attempt by an Islamist terror group in Amsterdam to attack the city’s huge Gay Pride parade in 2018 using explosives and assault rifles. Seven men were arrested and tried. Police seized over 200 pounds of fertilizer and other bomb-making materials.

Also in 2018, arrests were also made in Paris, where another Islamist group – acting in the name of Islamic State – planned multiple attacks on gay venues and events.

In the Netherlands, strings of attacks on gay men have been committed by young Moroccan men.

Just as during the wave of murders and bashings in Sydney in the 1980s and 1990s, it is probable that most incidents of anti-gay assaults and harassment are unreported. But they contribute powerfully to a sense that these migrants, seeking protection in tolerant liberal societies, are antagonistic to the basic values of their countries of asylum. In turn, this feeling of deep unease is eagerly exploited by the enemies of tolerance: not only neo-Nazis and the other creatures of the far right but also – and much more importantly – by value-free political opportunists driven not by the welfare of the people but only by lurid visions of their own power and glory.

The prognosis

To discover how to deal with the democratic angst, we must first discover what it causing it, and what is not.

Many proposed contributors seem not, on close examination, to be likely culprits – mostly because these factors were at play in previous decades when there was no such fear about the state of democratic government. If these factors did not produce such a result before, how can they be blamed for causing it now?

Broadly, and despite the temporary impact of moderately high interest rates, economic growth is fairly health across most of the eight “bellwether” countries in our survey. Income and wealth inequality has worsened, but this is a long-term trend going back well into the last century. Unemployment rates are lower than they have been for many decades.

And these economic factors do not play out in ways that explain the significant differences between those eight countries. For instance, economic conditions in Hungary have improved dramatically since the turn of the century, and cannot explain the rise of Viktor Orbán. Similarly, Germany and Denmark have done well on most economic indicators, so this does not explain why the far-right in Germany is causing so many problems, nor why Denmark has retreated so strikingly from its once-liberal approach to crime and rehabilitation.

And why would historically minor and transitory economic and social hiccups have such an effect when much bigger disruptions in previous decades did not? Since the Second World War, we have lived through the threat of nuclear annihilation in the fifties and sixties; oil shocks and stagflation in the seventies; 18% mortgage rates in the eighties; and savage recession and high unemployment in the nineties. If not then, why now?

To explain what is going on, we are left with only two broad areas of dysfunction: widespread weaknesses in social cohesion, and the impact of mass migration of refugees and asylum seekers.

Around the developed world, the gates are slamming shut on irregular migration. Countries are able to close their borders and, though the methods may be brutal,  governments are being given no choice by their electorates.

In any case, migration to developed countries is not a solution to the massive problem of forcibly displaced people: the numbers are too vast and the proportions reaching the west are far too small. If there is any solution at all, it will have to be within the regions that refugees come from. Liberal democracies have a moral obligation to help that process but whether they will, or can, is questionable. The human tragedies will continue. But western countries can, and will, shield themselves.

A less manageable threat to democratic polity is entrenched deep within our societies. Liberal democracies cannot function without common acceptance of its values and procedures. In five on the nations on our list, fewer than 50% have confidence in the basic goodwill and competence of their governments. Of the other three, none score above 60%.

Trust in the sources of information is worse. Huge numbers of people no longer believe what they read in the newspaper or see on television. There are good reasons for this: news outlets have been hijacked by proprietors as political playthings. Between The New York Times and Fox News, the BBC and the Daily Mail, or The Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph, which do you choose?

The fragmentation of information media amplifies the problem. It is the job of journalists to tell the truth but if their audiences don’t believe they are being told the truth, lies are readily believed instead.

But none of this means the democratic project is in a terminal phase. Just the opposite.

The Murdoch empire is crumbling and unlikely to far outlast its 92-year-old mastermind. Everywhere, shock-horror tabloid newspapers have been unable to adapt to the online environment but their more serious competitors have. The array of quasi-journalistic sources (The Policy Post is one, after all) include good as well as bad, rational as well as weird, but a broadening of voices may be more healthy than not. Irresponsible proprietors of social media platforms cultivate the worst purveyors of toxic hatred but the imperative to civilise those platforms may eventually prove irresistible.

The prospects of far-right populists taking control of the major democracies have been massively overblown. As long as a workable election system remains in place, these people are as vulnerable to the electoral cycle as anyone else. Even if they attain power, and most don’t, their unsuitability for government becomes quickly apparent. They have no workable answers to the problems they promise to remedy, and the winds of political reality can be particularly chilly for unclad emperors.

A second Trump presidency is looking less likely by the moment. Marine LePen lost the French elections yet again.

Alternative für Deutschland appears to have passed its peak without coming close to power. The snake oil of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss was quickly revealed as a poor substitute for serious governing.

In Denmark, Social Democrats are solidly in power.

In the Netherlands, the far-right Party of Freedom led by Geert Wilders came first in last year’s election, winning 37 of the 150 seats, on the basis of one policy only: Islamic migration. Wilders is a part of the new coalition government but the other parties refused to accept him as Prime Minister. Other parties are unlikely to allow Wilders to continue owning the migration issue; they will harden their refugee policies still further to allow more progressive domestic programs, and more outgoing foreign and European policies, to continue.

Populists and would-be dictators can remain in power under only two conditions: either by repression, or by the absence of a viable opposition.

It was the absence of opposition that allowed Boris Johnson to win the 2019 British election, for Trump to lead the polls until recently in the United States, and (combined with repression) for Viktor Orbán to remain in power for 14 years. In the US and Britain, political fortunes swung wildly when viable progressive alternatives appeared.

And in Hungary, Orbán may be reaching his use-by date. He secured a crushing victory in 2022 but this year’s elections for the European Parliament delivered him a serious setback. And, for the first time in many years, Hungarians have a choice. Support for the new centre-right Respect and Freedom Party has soared: it now commands 30% support in the polls against 44% for Orbán’s Fidesz.

It has been a difficult few years for liberal democrats but the evidence supports optimism about the future. Don’t bet against democracy: you’ll lose.


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