Ever since Brexiters and Donald Trump won in 2016, the world’s big-picture political story has been that democracy is under siege.
This summer, Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in Brazil, Narenda Modi’s Kashmir crackdown and dramatic electoral gains for the anti-immigrant Alternative fur Deutschland in eastern Germany have only amplified widespread beliefs about the inexorable advance of the authoritarian right.
This general story line is dangerously true, but an intriguing counter-narrative may be starting to appear: Small-D democrats are starting to play offense. Not that you would know it, as American media obsess over Trump and the countless Democratic presidential candidates.
Still, a handful of remarkable political events has occurred during the five weeks since Aug. 28. That day, Italy’s hard-right hatemonger, Matteo Salvini, was outmaneuvered and ousted by his erstwhile partners, the neither-left-nor-right Five Star Movement, and the left-of-center Democratic Party.
A week and a half later, on Sept. 8, Vladimir Putin’s dictatorial grip was symbolically loosened when his party lost seats in an election for Moscow’s Duma, or city council.
Next, the upshot of Israel’s Sept. 17 election is that Benjamin Netanyahu’s histrionic hyper-nationalism, at the very least, will be curbed even if he miraculously can form a government.
On the 24th — the day that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for an impeachment inquiry — Britain’s Supreme Court declared that Boris Johnson’s five-week suspension of Parliament was not legal.
And in Austria, the center-right People’s Party and Greens made big gains in parliamentary elections on Sept. 29, at the expense of the far-right Freedom Party.
What’s more, in this spring’s European Parliament elections, an expected populist wave failed to materialize. Instead: right-wing parties in Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands collapsed; the Greens unexpectedly surged in Germany, France, Ireland and Britain; the left gained ground in Spain and Portugal; and even Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally in France got a smaller share of the vote than in the 2014 E.U. elections.
The victory of Ekrem Imamoglu in Istanbul’s mayoral election in June also was a sign that Turkey’s strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is not invincible.
Further evidence that right-wing extremism may be waning can be found in the ascendance of centrist, internationalist and forward-looking parties that began with the victory of Emmanuel Macron and his new party, En Marche, in 2017. Last week, former prime minister Matteo Renzi launched his own new party, Italia Viva, as a putative Italian version of En Marche. Albert Rivera’s center-right Ciudadanos (or Citizens) Party in Spain also sees itself as an alternative to the traditional or more extreme right and left. And in Britain, the centrist Liberal Democrats are benefiting from Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s chaotic death march toward Brexit and the Labour Party’s dalliance with Marxism.
Back in the U.S., the unfolding Ukraine scandal may finally tarnish Trump’s Teflon coating. And support for impeachment is rising. Meanwhile, a few Republicans are trying to reclaim their party.
So, what’s going on? Is all this an epiphenomenon, a series of coincidences or the dream of a believer in liberal democracy?
The same problems that led to the rise of the hard right are largely still with us: Immigration, resentment toward elites, globalization, the decline of the middle class and the left’s inability to figure out what to do about it.
Perhaps, it’s a new generation of leaders who see that political gridlock and the old left-right battles and endless political fighting do nothing to solve the world’s overarching problems of climate change, inequality and the tinders of class conflict.
It’s still too early for true believers in democracy to pop the corks. However, it is time to pay attention to a possible change in the political winds.
Andrew L. Yarrow has been a U.S. history professor, a New York Times reporter, a political speechwriter and an author.
