On July 4, 2026, the United States will celebrate 250 years since its founding. Rarely will an anniversary have coincided so exactly with the exhaustion of the idea that made it possible. It will be like toasting a world that no longer exists. The nation that presented itself for decades as the guarantor of the global democratic order has crossed, according to the most rigorous political scientists, the line that separates democracy from competitive authoritarianism. It is not a metaphor or a rhetorical exaggeration. In 2025, the number of autocracies in the world will surpass the number of democracies for the first time. While the guardian has become the arsonist, others watch and wait. But the most disturbing thing is not that the authoritarians are winning. The thing is that those who should have opposed them seem to have forgotten why.
A year ago, at the inauguration of , the most revealing image was not the revanchist speech nor the presence of the so-called Reactionary International – from the Italian to the Salvadoran – while leaders like the French or the were not even invited. It was the privileged place occupied by the smiling technology magnates, next to the new president. The fusion between political and economic power was now shamelessly exhibited.
Today, these magnates not only accumulate unprecedented wealth: they exert an unprecedented cultural and communicative influence. And some no longer hide their contempt for democracy. , one of the most influential ideologues of this new right, said it bluntly: “I have stopped believing that freedom and democracy are compatible.” It is not a provocation: it is a program. , another of the intellectual references of the Trumpist environment, openly calls it reinventing fascism and putting it at the service of Silicon Valley. If they lose the midterm elections in 2026, he warns, they will have lost the opportunity to end democracy. Hence the urgency to consolidate power before voters can stop it.
Why should we worry? Because they concentrate a type of power that no previous elite had. The Rockefellers did not aspire to colonize Mars, nor to create private currencies, nor to condition military conflicts in real time. They did not think that to advance democracy had to be abolished. has precisely described what they represent: they concentrate three forms of domination that were previously dispersed. That of the plutocrat, who buys influence; that of the oracle, who is listened to as a prophet; and that of the platform, which controls the stage where others speak. The problem is no longer that this new power influences what is said, but that it decides what is said, how it circulates and in what terms it is understood.
But the success of contemporary authoritarianism cannot be explained only from above. It also requires asking why millions of people vote for leaders who will end up disenfranchising them, and why populism, defined as rebellion against elites, has enthroned an even larger elite.
Inequality breaks the link between citizens and institutions, and then leaders appear who promise protection from supposedly indifferent elites. They do not offer a coherent economic program – their policies tend to benefit the rich – but they do offer something politically decisive: recognition. Someone who names the pain and points out blame. Material frustration is channeled into identity, and liberal democracy—neutral, procedural, cosmopolitan—becomes the enemy because it seems to represent precisely those who abandoned the common people.
As you have described, the autocrats of the 21st century do not arrive with coups d’état, they arrive with ballots and stay using the tools of democracy. The process usually repeats itself. First move: polarize. Patriots against traitors. When politics turns into tribal warfare, defending the leader—no matter what—becomes a matter of loyalty, not reason. Second move: discredit. Institutions that could limit power are systematically attacked: judges are corrupt, journalists lie, electoral agencies commit fraud, universities indoctrinate. And when institutions lose credibility, they are no longer able to exercise their counterbalancing function. Third move: replace. Once discredited, the institutions are “reformed”, that is, they are filled with loyalists. Everything still seems democratic—there are elections, there is parliament, there are courts—but the content has been emptied. Only the shell remains. The most perverse thing is that citizens actively participate in the process. Those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 believed they were saving democracy from a non-existent fraud. Convinced of defending it, they were dismantling it.
The year 2026 will put this model to the test. In November, the US midterm elections will decide whether Trump consolidates his power or finds an institutional brake. In October, Brazil will choose between an octogenarian Lula and a Bolsonarism that awaits its moment. In April, Hungary will hold elections in which the European laboratory of this authoritarianism faces its first serious challenge in fifteen years. In Germany, it aims for historic results in the Eastern regional elections. In France, the municipal elections will measure the strength of Marine Le Pen before the presidential elections of 2027. The board is open: either the democracies react, or the emptying is consummated.
But with what moral authority can Europe resist? The authoritarianism that comes from the other side of the Atlantic has broken the link between power and legitimacy. The deepest damage is not only the concentration of power, but the breakdown of the postwar pact: the promise that law would also bind the powerful. And Europe, which should be its guardian, has been complicit. In 2025, while he invoked the international order to defend Ukraine, he quietly suspended it for Gaza. It’s Joseph Conrad’s old formula: light at home, heart of darkness on the margins. The same thing that Europe applies today on its borders, externalizing the horror to Libya, Türkiye or Morocco. In June 2026, the new Migration and Asylum Pact will come into force, with faster deportations and return centers. Today they are the migrants. Who will be next?
It is not classic authoritarianism. It is something more insidious: a crisis of meaning. Contemporary Europe resembles the butler of The remains of the dayfrom: proud of the procedure and technical excellence, but reluctant to examine the purposes it serves. Manage and time. Only at the end, on the dock, does the protagonist admit that he dedicated his life to perfecting service while the world he served fell apart. The question is whether Europe will have that moment of clarity in time or whether only the remains of the day will remain.
Meanwhile, a social democracy without a compass adopts the rhetoric of those it should fight. The British Keir Starmer and the Danish Mette Frederiksen imitate the right on migration, believing that in this way they disarm it. They only manage to legitimize their framework. And by abandoning their own land, they have left a space that others are beginning to occupy: emptying creates opportunities. In Copenhagen, the social democrats lost after 122 years not to the extreme right, but to a left that did not apologize for being such. In New York, the new mayor has sworn on a Koran in an abandoned station of the city’s first subway. They are signs that something can be born where the old order is breaking down.
2026 will be the year of decision. Not because anything will be resolved—crises of meaning are not resolved in an electoral cycle—but because we will know if there is anything left to defend or if we are just managing the decline. The question is no longer whether the old order can be sustained. It is whether we will be able to imagine another.
