ANALYSIS: 74% of humanity lives under authoritarian rule—and no one is taking to the streets

From 95 democracies to 87—the countdown

The numbers have the brutality of facts that leave no room for negotiation. In 2016, there were 95 democracies in the world—an all-time high. By 2025, only 87 remain. Opposing them: 92 autocracies. For the first time in decades, autocracies outnumber democracies on the world map.

But the real carnage is unfolding in the top tier. Liberal democracies—those that do more than just hold elections but also protect individual freedoms, an independent judiciary, and a free press—have fallen from 45 in 2009 to 31 in 2025. Fourteen liberal democracies lost in sixteen years. Almost one per year.

The chilling figure: 7%

And here is the figure that V-Dem lays on the table like a medical examiner issuing a death certificate. The proportion of the world’s population living in a liberal democracy has fallen to 7%. Seven percent. There are now more people living in closed autocracies—openly declared dictatorships—than in democracies of any kind.

Fifteen years ago, there were twice as many liberal democracies as closed autocracies. Today, the ratio has reversed. This is not a statistical adjustment. It is a civilizational shift.

Seven percent. That is the share of humanity still living under institutions designed to protect the individual from the state. Everything else is negotiation with those in power—or capitulation.

Simultaneous Autocratization

What sets this wave apart from all previous ones is not just its scale. It is its simultaneity. In 2025, forty-four countries were in the process of becoming autocratic—representing 41% of the world’s population. Forty-four countries that, at the same time, were seeing their checks and balances weakened, their elections rigged, their press muzzled, and their judges brought to heel.

Among them, twenty-eight were still democracies. And five were liberal democracies—countries that, on paper, checked all the boxes for democratic health—but behind the scenes, were sliding toward something else. The V-Dem report is unequivocal: no country, including long-established Western democracies, is immune to the erosion of democratic standards.

The Myth of Western Immunity

That’s the phrase European elites should have tattooed on their forearms. No country is immune. Not France. Not Germany. Not Canada. Not Sweden—the very country that is home to the V-Dem Institute. The idea that liberal democracy, once established, is irreversible was a post-Cold War fairy tale. The V-Dem report does not debunk this fairy tale. It shows that it had already been dead for twenty years—and that no one had wanted to look at the corpse.

Democracy is not a given. It is a living organism. And a living organism, when you stop feeding it, dies.

Trump is not the anomaly—he is the indicator

The V-Dem report identifies three trends in this wave of autocratization. The first: the deepening of autocracy in already authoritarian states. The second: the transition of fragile democracies toward autocracy. The third—and most terrifying—is the autocratization of established democracies. And the textbook example, the quintessential symbol, is the United States of America.

The V-Dem Institute doesn’t beat around the bush. The third wave of autocratization, it writes, has recently reached one of the main bastions of democracy. The United States. The country that, for a century, presented itself to the world as the beacon of democracy. The country that exported its institutions, imposed its values, and made its aid conditional on the adoption of democratic standards. That country is now ranked among those that are regressing.

The Second Trump Administration—A Chronicle of Erosion

Donald Trump did not invent American autocratization. Polarization, the collapse of trust in institutions, industrial-scale disinformation, gerrymandering, the capture of the Supreme Court—all of this existed before. But what the second Trump administration has done is accelerate the process to the point where it is visible to the naked eye. Authoritarian excesses—the concentration of executive power, attacks on the press, attempts to neutralize checks and balances—are no longer subtle shifts. They are full-scale assaults.

And yet, the United States remains, technically, a democracy. That is the perverse nature of the process. Modern autocratization does not begin with a coup d’état. It begins with an election. It does not abolish institutions. It strips them of their substance. It does not burn newspapers. It drowns them in noise.

The genius of contemporary autocratization is that it leaves the facades intact. Parliaments convene. Judges wear their robes. Journalists publish. But inside, everything has been hollowed out—like a tree eaten away by termites that remains standing until the first gust of wind.

Erosion from the Periphery

The V-Dem report documents what political scientists call incremental autocratization. No sudden break. No tanks in the streets. No parliament is dissolved. But there is a methodical chipping away. Freedom of expression is retreating—not through a censorship law, but through judicial harassment of critical voices. Freedom of association is eroding—not through bans, but through surveillance and stigmatization of civil society organizations. Elections remain free—but are becoming less and less fair.

It is this dynamic that V-Dem measures with surgical precision. And what it measures is that virtually all dimensions of democracy are deteriorating simultaneously in a growing number of countries. This is not a weakness here and there. It is a systemic collapse.

The media—always the first target

In every country undergoing a shift toward autocracy, the pattern is the same. The first target is the news. Not necessarily through outright censorship—even though that still exists. But through the concentration of media ownership in the hands of oligarchs close to those in power. Through selective funding. Through the creation of propaganda outlets disguised as news media. Through the flooding of social media with disinformation calibrated by algorithms that reward anger and punish nuance.

When a citizen no longer knows whom to trust for information, democracy is already half dead. For democracy rests on a fundamental premise: that informed citizens make informed choices. Take away reliable information, and all that remains is noise—and in the noise, it’s always the loudest that wins.

Censorship in the 21st century doesn’t cut off the microphone. It turns on ten thousand at once—and lets the public go deaf.

The Ideological Matrix of Autocratization

V-Dem does not hesitate to identify the main driving force behind this third wave: nationalist, anti-liberal, and far-right movements. From Japan to Chile, from Hungary to India, from Italy to the United States, the pattern is remarkably similar. A charismatic leader. Anti-elite rhetoric. The identification of an internal enemy—migrants, minorities, intellectuals, judges, journalists. And a promise: to give back to the people what the elites have stolen from them.

The problem is that what these movements, in turn, take away from the people—checks and balances, judicial independence, freedom of the press—is precisely what protects the people from the arbitrary exercise of power. They present themselves as defenders of the people and begin by dismantling the very protections meant to safeguard them.

The International of Autocrats

What makes this wave particularly dangerous is that it is no longer confined to a single country. Autocrats copy one another, support one another, and draw inspiration from one another. Orbán’s tactics in Hungary are studied and replicated by movements in Italy, Poland, and Israel. Putin’s methods for neutralizing civil society are exported to Africa and Central Asia. Modi’s strategies for exploiting religious nationalism are finding echoes in Brazil and the Philippines.

There is now a veritable international league of autocrats—informal, pragmatic, with no common ideology other than the rejection of liberal democracy. And this international league has a considerable advantage over democrats: it has no standards to uphold.

Democrats play chess. Autocrats play with the rules of the game—and when they lose, they overturn the chessboard.

Increasingly Fragile Democracies

V-Dem has observed a relatively new phenomenon: the growing volatility of political regimes. Countries no longer slowly shift from one regime to another. They fluctuate. A democracy can collapse in a matter of years. An authoritarian regime may temporarily ease up—only to crack down harshly again. This constant instability creates a climate of uncertainty that, in itself, weakens democratic institutions.

For democracy needs time. It needs predictability. It needs citizens to believe that the rules of the game will not change overnight. When that trust disappears, when every election becomes an existential referendum, when every change in government threatens to call everything into question, democracy ceases to be a stable system and becomes a permanent battlefield.

The Trap of Authoritarian Power Shifts

And that is precisely what autocrats want. Constant chaos is their ally. The more institutions are weakened, the more citizens yearn for a strongman. The more elections are contested, the more skepticism toward democracy grows. The more extreme the polarization, the more compromise—that cardinal virtue of democracy—appears to be a weakness.

It is a vicious cycle that political scientists document with terrifying precision. The erosion of trust breeds radicalization. Radicalization breeds instability. Instability breeds a demand for authority. And authority, once established, breeds further erosion of trust—in the institutions it has not yet destroyed.

The deadly paradox of our time: it is in the name of the people that the protections of the people are dismantled. And it is the people who applaud—until they realize, too late, that the lock that was broken was that of their own cell.

Optimists and Their Theory of Cycles

The question raised by the V-Dem report—should we view this as a lasting shift or a reversible phase?—is the billion-dollar question. Optimists cling to the theory of cycles. Huntington had shown this: every ebb has been followed by a new wave. After the 1930s came the postwar era. After the dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s came the Third Wave. The history of democracy is said to be a pendulum swing, not a free fall.

And it is true that some signs are encouraging. Pro-democracy movements exist everywhere—in Iran, Myanmar, Russia, and Georgia. Civil societies are resisting. Judges are standing their ground. The very fact that V-Dem can publish this report from Sweden shows that not all spaces for academic freedom have been closed off yet.

Realists and Their Reasons to Tremble

But realists—and the V-Dem report clearly leans in this direction—see structural differences from previous setbacks. First, the scale: never before have so many countries become autocratic simultaneously. Second, the duration: twenty-five years with no sign of reversal. Finally, and most importantly, technology. The tools for surveillance, information manipulation, and social control available to autocrats today are unprecedented in human history.

China has shown that it is possible to build a system of total surveillance compatible with economic growth. Russia has shown that it is possible to destabilize Western democracies from the outside, at minimal cost, through disinformation. And social media—invented in Silicon Valley in the name of free speech—has turned out to be the most powerful tool for radicalization ever created.

Previous waves receded because dictatorships were ineffective. The problem of our time is that modern autocracies have learned to be effective—and their model is beginning to appeal to people.

Beyond Institutions: Democratic Faith

V-Dem’s data measures institutions. It counts elections, assesses judicial independence, and quantifies press freedom. But it does not measure something deeper, more elusive, and perhaps more decisive: people’s faith in the very idea of democracy.

For democracy is not merely a set of institutions. It is a shared belief. The belief that equal citizens, deliberating freely, can govern their own destiny. The belief that compromise is preferable to domination. The belief that law is superior to force. When this belief collapses—when citizens themselves cease to believe that democracy protects them—institutions become empty shells.

Democratic fatigue—the ailment of the century

And perhaps this is the true diagnosis that the V-Dem report touches upon without explicitly naming it. What is collapsing is not just a political system. It is a horizon of meaning. Liberal democracy sold itself as the best possible system—and it has failed to deliver on its promise. It has not prevented skyrocketing inequality. It has not halted climate change. It has not protected the middle class from globalization. It has failed to address the crisis of meaning facing contemporary societies.

And when a system fails to keep its promises, people look elsewhere. Not necessarily out of authoritarian conviction. Out of despair. Out of weariness. Out of anger toward elites who have privatized the benefits of democracy and socialized its failures.

You don’t kill democracy with a gun. You kill it with disappointment. A hundred disappointments. A thousand broken promises. And one day, when someone suggests tearing it all down, half the country responds: why not?

The most alarming figure in the report

Among the forty-four countries becoming more autocratic, five are liberal democracies. V-Dem does not explicitly name all of them in the available excerpt, but the message is devastating. A liberal democracy sliding toward autocracy is not a fragile country on the brink of collapse. It is a model that is cracking. It is proof that institutional safeguards—the constitution, the separation of powers, a free press, and civil society—can be circumvented, neutralized, and hollowed out from within.

We knew that democracy was vulnerable in countries where it had never truly taken root. We are now discovering that it is vulnerable everywhere—including where it seemed to have foundations of granite.

The Reverse Domino Effect

And this is where the danger becomes existential. For in the 1970s and 1980s, the domino effect worked in democracy’s favor. One country became democratic, its neighbors followed suit, and the ripple effect was virtuous. Today, the domino effect works in the opposite direction. When the United States becomes more authoritarian, the message sent to the world is clear: if even America abandons democratic norms, why should we uphold them?

When India—the world’s largest democracy by population—drifts toward religious nationalism, 1.4 billion people are suddenly counted among the statistics of autocracy. When Japan and Chile elect nationalist leaders, it signals that the cultural antibodies against the far right—forged by history and the memory of dictatorships—are no longer strong enough to resist.

There is an unwritten law in geopolitics: when the most powerful cheats, everyone cheats. The United States has just given every autocrat on the planet implicit permission.

European Denial

Europe looks on the United States with complacent dismay. As if autocratization were an American virus against which the Old Continent were immune. This stance amounts to willful blindness. The far right is leading in the polls or in power in about ten European countries. Italy is governed by a post-fascist. Hungary has been an electoral autocracy for a decade. France has seen the National Rally become the country’s leading political force.

And Germany—the Germany of the Basic Law, of the memory of Nazism, of “never again”—is seeing the AfD achieve results that would have been unthinkable fifteen years ago. The photo of the Berlin protester holding up a “Democracy” sign in front of the Brandenburg Gate is not a symbol of strength. It is a cry for help.

European institutions—last bastion or Maginot Line?

The European Union has an arsenal of democratic safeguards—Article 7, budgetary conditionalities, the Court of Justice. But this arsenal has not prevented Hungary from drifting for fifteen years. It has not prevented Poland from enduring eight years of war against its own judicial system. The European Union is a bulwark—but one whose gates are open and whose guardians are divided.

The question is no longer whether Europe will be affected by the third wave of autocratization. The question is how many European countries have already tipped over—and how many refuse to admit it.

Europe looks in the mirror and sees a democracy. The V-Dem report looks at Europe and sees cracks that the mirror refuses to show.

Naming the Enemy

The first thing to do is to stop using euphemisms. Saying “populism” when we should say “authoritarianism.” Saying “illiberalism” when we should say “destruction of checks and balances.” Saying “strongman” when we should say “aspiring dictator.” Words matter. When we refuse to name a threat, we refuse to fight it.

V-Dem names it. V-Dem measures it. V-Dem documents it. But measuring isn’t enough. This data must move beyond academic circles and reach the public. Everyone reading these lines must understand that 74% isn’t just an abstract number. It’s the world in which their contemporaries live. It may be, tomorrow, the world in which their children will live.

Defending what remains—and rebuilding

Democracy is not defended by celebrating it. It is defended by practicing it. By strengthening checks and balances when everything pushes to weaken them. By funding a free press when algorithms reward propaganda. By protecting judicial independence when autocrats want subservient judges. By teaching critical thinking when disinformation is industrialized.

And above all—above all—by keeping democracy’s promises. By reducing inequality. By addressing the climate crisis. By giving citizens concrete reasons to believe that the democratic system works for them, not just for the elites who speak so eloquently about it at international conferences.

Democracy has not been defeated by its enemies. It has been abandoned by its heirs. The V-Dem report is a mirror. The question is not what it shows—but what we will do with it.

Not tomorrow—now

The V-Dem 2025 report is not just another academic paper to be filed away between conferences. It is a warning. The kind of warning that historians, fifty years from now, will cite either as the moment the world opened its eyes, or as the moment the world looked at the numbers, shrugged, and changed the channel.

The proportion of democracies in the world has fallen back to 1995 levels. The proportion of the world’s population living in democracies has fallen back to 1978 levels. And the gains of half a century of democratization—all those revolutions, transitions, and sacrifices—are being erased before our very eyes.

The question posed by V-Dem—and one we must ask ourselves

Is this a lasting shift or a reversible phase? The report leaves the question open. But it lays out the elements of the answer with brutal clarity: the duration, scale, and intensity of this wave of autocratization are unprecedented. And democracies, far from defending themselves, continue to erode from within.

The answer will not come from research institutes. It will not come from reports. It will come from what seven billion human beings decide to do—or not to do—in the years ahead. And if the history of waves of democratization teaches us one thing, it is that nothing is ever guaranteed. Neither freedom nor tyranny.

Democracy does not die in the darkness. It dies in broad daylight, before billions of witnesses who were staring at their phones.

Signed, Jacques PJ Provost