France's Front National president Marine Le Pen and former US President advisor Steve Bannon at the FN annual congress. March, 2018, Lille. Sylvian Lefevre/Press Association. All rights reserved.
The decade that has elapsed since the financial crash in 2008 has not been an easy one for progressive politics. As contributors to this series have pointed out, the fortunes of liberal centrist politics have collapsed in many western democracies, and new illiberal democracies and authoritarian regimes are on the rise across the world. Since the end of the cold war the number of democracies has been steadily rising according to the Economist Intelligence Unit index, but in recent years it has rapidly gone into reverse. Only 19 states still qualified as full liberal democracies in 2017. Both the United States and France were classed in the flawed democracy category. After the high hopes at the beginning of the 1990s of a new era of democratic advance following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of apartheid we have entered a period of democratic retreat.
What is especially alarming, as Edmund Fawcett makes plain, is not just the declining fortunes of democracy and fears about the stability of the ones we have in the face of the severe challenges they face, but also the growing support for new parties and movements of the hard right. They see themselves as insurgents against the established order, and are explicitly against liberalism, against the rule of law, against the rules based multilateral international order, and against science and objectivity. Many questions which were thought to have been settled have been reopened.
