The new V-Dem Democracy Report confirms that democracy is in regression. In 2025, 44 countries were undergoing autocratization, including Western democracies such as the United States, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Liberal democracy faces warning signs that can no longer be ignored. The author Miguel Freitas argues that this is not a simple shift in the balance between left and right, but a change in the terrain.
Social networks have become privileged sources of information and allowed populism to transform complex issues — immigration, security, gender, diversity, national identity — into tests of belonging. Culture has come to function as a frontier that separates people, not just ideas. The term "woke" is described as an elastic word that allows grouping various concepts without needing to discuss them individually.
The author warns that there are real problems behind this reaction: the loss of trust in elites, distance from institutions, tensions associated with immigration, and the feeling that certain cultural transformations were too rapid. However, the problem worsens when fear permeates the discussion and assigning blame becomes easier than finding solutions. The illiberal response is no longer limited to contesting ideas — it aims to remake the place of institutions, eliminating diversity programs, reversing inclusion policies, and presenting universities, media, and scientific bodies as captured systems to control or dismantle.
The V-Dem report identifies a common pattern in autocratization processes: attacks on freedom of expression, pressure on civil society, weakening of power control mechanisms, and erosion of institutions. Freitas warns that moderate parties may pave the way for these forces when, for fear of appearing soft, they begin to adopt seemingly small gestures — suspicions about the media, tougher borders, reversals in gender identity laws. Each action seems insignificant, but it is the sum that shifts the center. Democracy rarely disappears with a bang — it begins by seeming merely less necessary.
