The greatest threat to democracy in the twenty-first century is not military coup but legal erosion. Scholars of democratic backsliding — Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt among them — have documented how elected leaders dismantle democracy from within: packing courts, undermining electoral integrity, delegitimising opponents, and capturing media. Because each step is individually legal, the process is hard to recognise in real time and harder still to reverse. The guardrails of democracy are not only formal institutions — constitutions, courts, and elections — but informal norms: the expectation that leaders will not use state power for personal or partisan advantage. When norms erode, formal institutions must bear a burden they were not designed to carry alone. The defence of democracy ultimately requires citizens and institutions willing to name erosion when they see it.

💡 Did you know? According to the V-Dem Institute, 2023 marked the seventh consecutive year of global democratic decline. The number of people living in democracies is now lower than at any point since the 1980s. This is sometimes called the 'third wave of autocratisation'.