By Shalini Randeria
Paradoxically, the expansion of democracy worldwide has often gone hand in hand with its erosion from within by formal democratically legitimized means. Many citizens in Western countries have lost trust in liberal democracy due to unfulfilled expectations or economic inequality after neoliberal austerity policies. They feel increasingly powerlessness to make their voice heard or influence decisions affecting their daily lives. These grievances coupled with anxiety caused by socio-cultural, religious and sexual diversity, makes it easier for right-wing populist parties to stir fears of a supposedly imminent loss of identity. A diffuse sense of disappointment and resentment among voters is instrumentalized by democratically elected charismatic demagogues. They consolidate their own power using disinformation and a politics of hate spread through social media. But these soft authoritarian leaders also strengthen their grip on power by manipulating voting laws to insidiously change the rules of the game. In these regimes rule by law replaces the rule of law. The result is a permanent structural transformation of the state and a gradual shift towards soft authoritarianism. We are, therefore, not just dealing with a crisis of representative democracy. Rather, democracy itself is at stake today.
Soft-authoritarian regimes are a new phenomenon that blur the boundaries between democracy and autocracy by using parliamentary majorities, legal and constitutional means as well as courts, as is currently in the USA. Whether in Hungary, India, Israel, the Philippines, Turkey or the USA, to name but a few cases in point, the style of government shows striking similarities. Without declaring a formal state of emergency, civil rights, especially women’s rights and minority rights, are being undermined slowly but sytematically. Expressing dissent is made increasingly difficult not only due to cooptation of the media but by labelling political opposition as “anti-national”. While liberal civil society organizations are attacked, far-right, often religious right-wing groups are strengthened through state support. Soft authoritarian governments do not shy away from using state machinery at their disposal to harass political and civil society opponents, who are treated as enemies. Therefore, courts, independent NGOs and media, as well as universities – the very institutions that can stand up to authoritarian politics – are among the primary targets of soft-authoritarian regimes.
Several other features besides a pronounced anti-liberalism can serve to identify this newly emerging form of rule: The close nexus between oligarchs and politicians (“crony capitalism”); charismatic demagogues, who often embodies a toxic masculinity; an aggressive ethno-religious nationalism that, is strongly associated with notions of “purity of the nation”. The marginalization of minorities is a consequence of such an imagination of an ethnically, racially or religiously homogeneous nation that is defined as a political ideal and goal. Soft-authoritarian leaders claim to embody “the people”, whose interest they claim to represent by pitting the so defined majority community against their enemies within – such as cosmopolitan liberal rootless elites, stigmatized minorities, or migrants and refugees. Thus is a binary opposition constructed between “us and them”, on which Trump’s or Orban’s polarizing political strategy rests. With regressive campaigns such as “Make America great again” or “Take back control”, these nostalgic narratives represent backward-looking utopias.
It is important to clearly identify this pathology of our times in order to reject the extreme right’s self-representation as the torchbearer of freedom (including, more recently, academic freedom). And it is not only important to diagnose the symptoms of soft authoritarianism, but also to understand its causes if we are to have any chance of combating it. Wendy Brown, the American political scientist, has pointed out that it was neoliberal anti-politics that prepared the ground for today’s apathy and even hostility towards democratic political life. With its reliance on technocratic governance instead of participatory deliberation and accountability, neo-liberals and libertarians declared the state to be the problem. Their polemic against “the nanny state” denied the legitimacy of claims to social justice as pandering to “political correctness”.
As the rhetoric of Trump’s election campaign blatantly illustrates, misogynistic, sexist and homophobic, racist and discriminatory slogans resonate strongly – especially with white men without college education, who feel threatened by women’s empowerment and gender equality as endangering their masculinity and traditional patriarchal roles. When an American blogger’s slogan aimed at women, “Your Body – My Right”, resonates positively on right wing social networks today, it points to deeply rooted sexism and misogyny. These anxieties, economic insecurity and feelings of loss of privilege are instrumentalized by right-wing populist politicians, who scapegoat self-confident women, migrants, or sexually, ethnically or religiously distinct minorities.
Another factor fueling the mobilization against women’s rights and minority rights is the widespread demographic panic surrounding falling birth rates and ageing populations. Coupled with high levels of emigration from countries of eastern Europe, or increasing numbers of migrants in western Europe or the USA , these demographic trends result inevitably in changes in the composition of the population. Conservative parties as well as the extreme right have used these to spread fear of so-called “depopulation”, of losing the “demographic race” to minorities or non-Whites. They point to the decline of the so-called “genetic purity” of the nation, along with the disintegration of the institution of the nuclear family due to the irretrievable loss of patriarchal control over women, who are seen as not fulfilling their patriotic duty to reproduce the nation. The new rhetoric of “demographic security” is of apiece with the racist narrative of the “Great Replacement” which warns of an imminent attack on “Christian values” and civilization by (Muslim) refugees and migrants. These demographic fears of in turn serve to legitimize pronatalist and anti-immigration measures along with anti-gender ideologies and attacks against LGBTQI rights. Conservative politicians all over Europe have contributed to the normalization of these right-wing populist discourses.
The aim of population policies implemented by states has always been to regulate both the size and the composition of their populations to create a politically desirable nation. Aggressive pronatalist policies that violate the hard-won reproductive rights and freedom of women are thus a centerpiece of soft-authoritarian rule: abortion has been criminalized in Poland and in various states in the USA. Plans are afoot to restrict access to contraception after Trump’s electoral victory. These restrictions hit poor women the hardest. In Hungary the legal recognition of trans and intersex people was de facto abolished under the Orbán government and gender studies at public universities was replaced by family studies.
The crisis of democracy today lies not in its inability to hold regular, free elections, but in the subtle, gradual but systematic distortion of the modes and mechanisms of political representation. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that soft authoritarian practices of “lawfare” can be challenged in courts. This requires not only an independent judiciary but also free media. Moreover, it needs strong, well-resourced and broad-based national and transnational alliances of civil society activists and social movements to collectively resist the assault on the rights of women, minorities and migrants.
Democracy needs constant vigilance; and it also needs constant care. It must be nurtured, renewed and deepened through active citizen participation, and through innovative grassroots practices. For as Till van Rahden rightly emphasizes, democracy is a way of life that needs to be taught, experienced and practiced in the public sphere just as in the family. Conceptualizing democracy as a way of life also points to the ways in which the public and private are entangled here. In times when democracy has become a fragile, endangered way of life, it is not enough to focus on its institutional functioning and on elections alone. We would do well to consider what democracy feels like; how it could be practiced in various spheres and be deepened in ordinary everyday life at home and elsewhere.
Ultimately, it is up to each one of us as active, critical, vigilant citizens to raise our voices against the subtle changes and creeping transgressions in many still formal democracies to ensure a sustainable future for a vibrant liberal democracy. We must take responsibility and act in solidarity with those who are struggling for democratic rights, law and justice in their societies under very risky conditions in Iran, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Russia or Hong Kong.
Shalini Randeria at TRANSEUROPA Festival 2025 with fellow panel members and audience © Claudia Correnti
Shalini Randeria was elected as president and rector of Central European University in 2021. She is the first woman, and the first person from the Global South, to take up this position since the founding of the university 30 years ago. Randeria has had a distinguished academic career as a sociologist/social anthropologist at institutions of higher education across Europe. She was rector of the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, and a professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, where she directed the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy. Randeria holds the Excellence Chair at the University of Bremen, where she leads a research group on “soft authoritarianisms.” She is deputy chair of the Class of Social and Related Sciences, Academia Europaea and a distinguished fellow of the Munk School, Toronto University. Randeria has published widely on the anthropology of globalization, law, the state, and social movements with a regional focus on India. Her influential podcast series, Democracy in Question, launched in 2021, is now in its ninth season