A persistent anxiety runs through Western democracies, often reflected in the tone of public debate, in the exhaustion of citizens, in the speed with which anger can become a political manifesto. This is a crisis of political culture.
According to recent data from the V-Dem Institute, the global democratic landscape has significantly eroded. The 2026 V-Dem Democracy Report captures the scale of the problem: by the end of 2025, 74% of the world’s population, about six billion people, lived in autocracies, while only 26% lived in democracies.
Across Europe and the United States, the democratic atmosphere is also changing. Public debate is increasingly shaped by suspicion and resentment, amplified by a digital public sphere that rewards speed, outrage and emotional certainty. Politics frequently rewards those who oversimplify, provoke and accuse.
It would be wrong to treat this malaise as mere irrationality, as someone could argue that many citizens have reasons to feel exposed. This is especially true of citizens who have experienced years of financial insecurity, social fragmentation, inflation, as well as a growing fear that the near future will be even harsher than the present. When the expectation of better living conditions fades, democratic patience ultimately weakens. Too often, mainstream politics has answered these anxieties with abstract optimism and vague promises.
Citizens who feel ignored become more receptive to those who claim to speak plainly in their name. Nevertheless, easy answers to multifaceted problems do not provide real solutions. There are political voices today, on both sides of the Atlantic, that seek to empty democracy of its liberal substance, using polarizing populist rhetoric. Institutions may be presented as enemies of the people, judges as political agents, journalists as purveyors of “fake news”, expertise as elitism. Any compromise is portrayed as weakness, since the populist appeal lies in the removal of doubt. Every problem receives a culprit and every complexity has a simple cure.
The danger today is not the formal abolition of liberal democracy. It is the gradual hollowing out of its meaning: electoral victories treated as blank cheques, public debate detached from people’s everyday lives, institutions drained of trust. This is because a democracy may sustain its external form while losing the habits that make it liberal: moderation, accountability, balance, respect for minorities, fidelity to facts and acceptance of institutional limits. What is often called ‘illiberal democracy’ is therefore not a contradiction without consequences, describing a political reality in which there are elections but freedoms are shrinking.
The defense of liberal democracy cannot be reduced to empty rhetoric and excessive declarations of good intent. Instead, Western democracies must be credible in practice, closer to citizens’ everyday lives. The safeguarding of liberal democracy requires enhanced transparency in public policy, competence in government, accountability in power and a serious effort to restore social confidence.
Democratic forces should not dilute their principles to the lowest common denominator. They should resist the temptation to imitate the language of those who benefit from division, since a politics that bends too easily before cynicism eventually loses the capacity to defend anything. Liberal democracy has never promised perfection. Its promise is more modest and more valuable: free societies can flourish without surrendering to fear. Therefore, the West needs a return to the path of reason, a politics able to defend freedom with responsibility and pursue reform without institutional recklessness and polarization.
The ‘point of no return’ may not arrive through a single dramatic rupture. There exists a risk that liberal democracies may devolve into a state of ‘majoritarian tyranny’. This may come quietly, when citizens cease to expect truth from politics and self-restraint from those who govern in their name. One thing is certain, however: although the system has to evolve, modern democratic societies cannot afford more political experiments built on contempt for reason. Freedom is choosing one’s destiny and, in the sometimes terrible reality of our world, the path that the West will follow must be chosen wisely.
Mr. Apostolos Samaras holds a Ph.D. in European Law from the Law School of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He is a Research Fellow at the European Programme ‘Ariane Condellis’ of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP).
