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.
