The Daily Populous Thursday March 19th, 2026 night edition
Authored by english.elpais.com and submitted by plz-let-me-in

Democratic backsliding is advancing in the developed world. The annual report from Sweden’s V-Dem Institute leaves no room for doubt: almost a quarter of the world experienced democratic backsliding, or a shift towards autocratization, in 2025, and six of the 10 newly regressive countries identified in the research are located in Europe and North America, including G-7 powers such as Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

But the most unsettling conclusion reached by the Swedish institute is that the United States — once a proud beacon of the more or less free world — is no longer a liberal democracy and is now on a par with countries like Hungary or Turkey, thanks to President Donald Trump. Autocracy is also spreading throughout Europe, but its reach extends far beyond the Old Continent: 41% of the world’s population (3.4 billion people) now live in countries where democracy is eroding.

The institute, which belongs to the University of Gothenburg and uses 48 metrics in its evaluation, is one of the most reliable sources when it comes to rating the state of governments around the world, and the conclusion of its 2026 study confirms the worst fears about the authoritarian drift of the U.S. under Trump’s leadership.

According to V-Dem, the U.S. is hurtling toward autocracy at a faster pace than Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey (in all three cases, and in that of another self-proclaimed autocrat, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, it is a drift toward personalism, with strong, or alpha, leaders who impose themselves on and colonize the system, starting with Trump himself). Another similar case, in the so-called world’s largest democracy — at least nominally, because in V-Dem’s definition it is an “electoral autocracy” — would be that of Narendra Modi’s India.

“Our data on the United States goes back to 1789. What we are seeing now is the greatest democratic backsliding the country has ever seen,” says Staffan Lindberg, founder of the institute. Thus, according to the 2026 ranking, democracy in the U.S. has fallen back to the same level as in 1965, although the current situation is completely different from that of the civil rights era, when laws first introduced de facto universal suffrage. Since then, the report says, all progress has been erased.

While Trump’s first term was for some a mere anecdote destined to be erased by history — a misjudgment that some still lament — the Republican’s second term can already be defined as a rapid and aggressive concentration of power in the presidency (despite the titanic efforts of some judges to maintain the separation of powers). The speed with which American democracy is being dismantled is unprecedented in modern times, asserts the V-Dem report, which has published its assessments annually since 2012.

For the first time in more than half a century, researchers emphasize, the U.S. has lost its status as a long-term liberal democracy. The country is undergoing a rapid process of what the report’s authors call “autocratization,” the authoritarian drift already confirmed in Hungary, Serbia, Turkey, and India, among other countries. The difference lies mainly in the uniformly accelerated speed at which the destruction of the democratic system has taken place in the U.S. “It took Orbán in Hungary about four years, Vucic in Serbia eight years, and Erdoğan in Turkey and Modi in India about 10 years to suppress democratic institutions, something Trump achieved in just one year,” Lindberg points out.

Worldwide, democracy has regressed to its lowest levels since the mid-1970s, something the research director calls the largest global and simultaneous process of autocratization.

ICE family detention center in Dilley, Texas. Eric Gay (AP)

What criteria are used to assert that Trump’s America is increasingly distant from that of the Founding Fathers, the framers of the Constitution? The clearest indication of democratic erosion is a “rapid and aggressive concentration of power in the presidency.” Congress has been sidelined, jeopardizing the checks and balances (judicial and legislative limitations on the executive branch) that are fundamental to American democracy.

In the first year of his current term, Trump signed 225 executive orders, while Congress, still controlled by Republicans, passed only 49 new laws. At the same time, civil rights have been rapidly eroding, and press freedom is at its lowest level since the 1940s. But it’s not just freedom of expression that is dwindling; journalists, in fulfilling their duty to inform, risk being directly insulted by the president.

Lindberg points out that there is no longer a meaningful separation between the legislative and executive branches. “The legislative branch has practically abdicated its powers in favor of the president. It no longer functions as a check on the executive branch,” and that, considering the scope of most of Trump’s executive orders (to shut down entire government departments, fire thousands of employees, or declare war on migrants), is very serious. More than 600 ongoing legal proceedings aim to curb the Republican’s accumulation of power in the courts and restore some of its functions to democracy.

Another aspect of the rapid deterioration of democracy in the United States, according to the report, is the elimination of internal safeguards that protect the federal government from abuse of power. “Trump has fired inspectors general and senior officials in every department and replaced them with loyalists. This is exactly what Orbán and Erdoğan did. They are removing the constraints on power. By now it should be obvious that Trump is aiming for a dictatorship.”

In addition to its disturbing findings, the V-Dem Institute report maps the distribution of power worldwide, which by the end of 2025 included 92 autocracies and 87 democracies. Nearly three-quarters of the world’s population (74%, or six billion people) live in the former. There are now more people living in closed or full autocracies (28%, or 2.3 billion) than in so-called electoral autocracies, or merely nominal democracies like Turkey or India (26%, or 2.2 billion). Only 600 million people (7% of the world’s population) live in full democracies.

According to the report, the most attacked aspect of democracy worldwide is freedom of expression, which worsened in 44 countries last year. The average global citizen today finds themselves, democratically speaking, as if they were living in 1978, since almost all the democratic gains of the so-called “third wave of democratization,” which began with the Portuguese Carnation Revolution of 1974, have been erased.

Other severely affected aspects of democracy include freedom of association, which went from improving in 54 countries in 2000 to declining in 24 in 2025; the fairness and transparency of electoral processes, which deteriorated in 22 countries last year; and government attempts to censor the media, the tactic most frequently used by autocratic regimes to stifle freedom: government censorship worsened in 44 countries over the past decade. Finally, torture — an increasingly common tool for suppressing opposition and dissent — was used in 33 countries in 2025.

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HchrisH on March 18th, 2026 at 17:08 UTC »

There are a lot of Republicans who don't understand the difference between Liberal Democrats and liberal democracy that would be very excited by this headline if they could read. There are also a lot of literate Republicans who do understand the difference between Liberal Democrats and liberal democracy that are even more excited.

Shadow293 on March 18th, 2026 at 16:42 UTC »

MAGA probably thinks this is good because we’re no longer “Liberal” and will ignore the “Democracy” part.

Shoddy_Pressure8284 on March 18th, 2026 at 16:36 UTC »

Everything. Trump. Touches. Dies.

This has been a truism for years, get with it, people.