French Socialist Party presidential candidate, Benoit Hamon,at a campaign meeting, AccorHotels Arena, Paris, March 19, 2017. Eliot Blondet/ Press Association. All rights reserved.Political scientists have long believed that when a country succeeds in achieving a democratic transition, creating stable institutions and accomplishing a certain level of wealth, it has a rather low risk of an authoritarian backlash.
There was the implicit assumption of a natural and irreversible path containing the following steps: 1) dictatorship, 2) dictablanda, 3) democradura, 4) democracy transition, 5) consolidated democracy. This assumption was valid for several decades and corroborated by the impressive wave of democratization that took place after 1990. In the last quarter of a century, in fact, both the number and the quality of democratic regimes has increased steadily, leading to what appeared to be a democratic triumphal march.
But for the first time over the last quarter of a century, democratic regimes are no longer consolidating and, above all, this apparent reversal manifests itself in procedures that belong to the secular democratic liturgy, namely free elections. The outbreak of this populist infection within most western democracies challenges the idea that once consolidated democracies are immune to the possibility of experiencing a non-democratic reversal.
