After a certain springtime of constitutional democracy and multilateralism between 1990 and 2010, the decline of democracy and the rule of law in the world is clear. This is pointed out by all the research centers that quantitatively document these evolutions, such as Freedom House, which state that we have witnessed two continuous decades of democratic deterioration, which on many occasions has been supported, paradoxically, by electoral majorities. It is as if democracy were devouring itself.

The recent, and perhaps the most worrying, example of this evolution has been the election of Trump in the United States and his first weeks in office, in which he has taken authoritarian measures that are putting at risk one of the most robust democracies in the world. But unfortunately he is not the only one: in many other parts of the world many authoritarian candidates have been supported by a good part of the electorate, as shown by the recurrent triumphs of Orbán in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey or Modi in India. And the victories of Bukele in El Salvador or Milei in Argentina. Or the rise of the extreme right in several solid European democracies such as France, Germany, Italy or Austria.

What explains this rise of authoritarian populism? There are no easy answers to this question because this evolution responds to multiple factors and has significant national variations. However, I dare to conjecture that it may be methodologically useful to distinguish four types of factors.

First, structural trends, which are common to many countries, such as the impact of the neoliberal nature of globalization. This globalization increased inequalities and deteriorated the situation of the working class in developed countries. Many of the manual workers who today support extreme right-wing positions do so because they are the losers of this globalization and are the ones who feel most threatened by immigration and by certain identity demands. And the extreme right apparently offers them alternatives with their anti-immigration discourses and policies, as explained by Francis Fukuyama, who after postulating in his best seller of the 1990s, “The End of History”, that liberal democracy had triumphed, now recognizes this setback in one of his latest books (“Liberalism and its Disenchantments”) and associates it with the inequalities derived from neoliberalism and the excesses of identity politics.

Second, because in many countries the rise of these authoritarian options is the result of explicit strategies of certain sectors that seek to undermine democracy by using elections: for example, the rise of the extreme right in the United States responds to complex social and cultural forces. But it has also been the fruit of a successful deliberate strategy to take over the Republican Party by politicians like Newt Gingrich or the Tea Party, supported by billionaires like the Koch brothers, as shown in DW’s documentary: “The rise of the far right in US politics“.

Third, because of mistakes by the democratic forces themselves: for example, the uncritical adherence to neoliberalism of the Democratic Party in the United States or of certain socialist parties in Europe progressively deprived these political forces of the support of the working classes, negatively impacted by globalization.

Fourth, because of certain constitutional designs. Indeed, as I have tried to show in some recent writings, taking up certain theses of Giovani Sartori in his 1990s book on “Comparative Constitutional Engineering“, these institutional arrangements count: some favor democratic deterioration, such as a presidential form of government and a majoritarian electoral system that leads to bipartisanship; while others could prevent it, or at least make it less likely, such as a parliamentary form of government and a proportional electoral system that stimulates multipartisanship.

Let’s compare Italy (multiparty parliamentarism) with the United States (two-party presidentialism): Giorgia Meloni, leader of the extreme right, became prime minister of Italy by being the most voted force in 2022. But the election was less divisive than Trump’s, and Meloni has had to moderate her positions to maintain the confidence of parliament and be able to govern. In contrast, Trump won the election by less than 2% of the total vote and yet controls all executive power and rules like an emperor.

Those of us who believe that constitutional democracy, despite its imperfections, is still the best form of government available, cannot simply lament its withering: we have to understand the reasons for this democratic decline and, above all, why it is so popular today to be anti-democratic, if we really want to have better tools to defend and deepen democracy. Otherwise, we will see democracy collapse through apparently democratic means, as Levitsky and Ziblatt warn in their well-known book: How Democracies Die.