The name Donald Trump is not mentioned once that evening. And yet what it stands for globally is omnipresent. Autocratic rulers, many of them democratically elected, have a tighter grip on the world than they did just a few years ago. The figures in the current democracy report from the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg are alarming. 74 percent of the world’s population lives in an autocracy, only seven percent live in a fully-fledged democracy compared to 12.5 percent ten years ago. These are values that were last recorded in the late 1970s during the Cold War.
