View from London: How Western democracy died

Western democracy is under threat, writes Thomas Fazi, an UnHerd columnist and translator.

From a stumbling economy to soaring crime, France has plenty of problems. But, judging by recent events, the government seems to have another threat in mind: social media. Earlier this month, prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into Elon Musk’s X, alleging foreign interference through algorithm manipulation, while also condemning the platform for spreading “hateful” content. This followed a police raid on the headquarters of the National Rally, France’s leading opposition party, after the launch of yet another dubious investigation into campaign financing.

The Fifth Republic is far from alone here. For Western democracy is under threat — not from “foreign adversaries”, or “far-Right populists”, but from its own elites. Whether in Britain, Germany or Ireland, censorship has become routine across Europe and beyond, even as dissent is increasingly criminalised and legal systems are weaponised to suppress opposition. In recent months, these trends have escalated into direct assaults on the basic institutions of democratic governance. In Romania, to give one example, an entire election was annulled because it delivered the wrong outcome, while other countries contemplate similar measures too.

In theory, all this is being carried out in the name of defending democracy. In truth, the purpose is clear: to help ruling elites maintain their grip on power in the face of a historic collapse of legitimacy. Whether they will succeed in doing so remains to be seen. What is clear, though, is that the stakes are enormous. If elites manage to entrench their control through increasingly authoritarian means, the West will enter a new era of managed democracy — or democracy in name only. If they fail, and in the absence of a coherent alternative, the resulting vacuum may give way to deepening instability, social unrest and systemic crisis. Either way, the outlook for the future of Western democracy is grim.

Critics have been raising alarms about this elite-driven democratic backsliding for years. As far back as 2000, political scientist Colin Crouch coined the term “post-democracy” to describe the fact that, even though Western societies boasted the trappings of freedom, they had increasingly become a meaningless facade. Elections, Crouch argued, had become tightly managed spectacles, orchestrated by professional persuaders who operated within a shared neoliberal consensus — pro-market, pro-business, pro-globalisation — and offered voters little choice on fundamental political or economic questions. Citizens, for their part, played a passive role, helpless in the face of political and corporate power. Politics, Crouch said, was “slipping back into the control of privileged elites in the manner characteristic of pre-democratic times”.

Crouch was writing at the peak of what Francis Fukuyama famously called the end of history. In the political scientist’s telling, the Cold War’s end, and the global triumph of Western liberal democracy, marked the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”. Subsequent upheavals — especially following the 2007-8 financial crisis — shattered any illusion of history’s halt. Yet Fukuyama’s core argument wasn’t so much that the clock of history had stopped spinning, but that, from then on, there would be no essential challenge to liberal democracy and market capitalism, deemed the pinnacle of social evolution.

Meanwhile, decision-making processes were increasingly insulated from democratic pressures, chiefly through the surrendering of national prerogatives to supranational institutions and super-state bureaucracies such as the European Union. This strategy of depoliticising democracy birthed what some have called “post-politics”: a regime where political spectacle thrives, but where systemic alternatives to the neoliberal status quo are not just repressed but foreclosed. The American journalist Thomas Friedman aptly described the post-political neoliberal regime as one where “policy choices get reduced to Pepsi or Coke” — minor variations within an unchallenged framework.

The concept of post-politics inevitably intersects with that of democracy. A minimalist view of democracy, focused only on rules and elections, suggests it survived the “end of history”, as formal institutions persisted and in some cases expanded (such as in former communist states). Yet substantive democracy — meaning citizens’ ability to actively shape government policy and the political agenda — has eroded dramatically. With no systemic alternative, politics and substantive democracy withered, resulting in declining voter turnout. One might say that the defining characteristic of post-democracy is that, despite the existence of elections, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. Instead, power and influence are concentrated in the hands of a small subset of society.

At the same time, new populist threats to the established order have emerged, predominantly from the Right. But so far, these too have failed to disrupt the status quo, partly because the West’s increasingly unpopular and delegitimised elites have turned to ever more brazen forms of repression to influence electoral outcomes and suppress these challenges. The Romanian case marked a fateful escalation: elites, backed by Nato and the EU, overturned a presidential election result, barring the populist candidate via unsubstantiated claims of Russian interference.

These events signal a disturbing trend: elites no longer limit themselves to “managing” electoral outcomes through “soft” or covert means — media manipulation, censorship, lawfare, economic pressure and intelligence operations. Rather, they are increasingly willing to discard the formal structures of democracy altogether.

Democracy is about something far more substantial than the mere act of voting. If it means anything, it must surely allow citizens to influence the state’s direction and shape the political agenda on fundamental issues — whether immigration, foreign policy, or the overall trajectory of social and economic policy. It’s hard to claim Western democracy is thriving on those terms. Yet that still leaves one more question: if “real democracy” is now dead, was it ever alive at all?

The future, unfortunately, seems bleak. The conditions enabling the brief period of substantive democracy are gone, and unlikely to return soon. In a real sense, substantive democracy is dead. Even so, the unravelling geopolitical order underpinning Western dominance — challenged by the emergence of a multipolar order underpinned by the rise of powers like China — marks a profound political and economic shift. The erosion of Western hegemony is weakening its elites, whose dominance has long relied on both internal suppression and power projection abroad. Declining influence overseas exacerbates domestic discontent, especially when fuelled by rising and systemic inequality.

This decline also paves the way for a potential new order — not just a geopolitical reconfiguration, but a potential reimagining of political and economic systems. As Western elites grapple with their waning power, there are vast opportunities for alternative visions of governance and democracy.

What lies ahead is not merely a question of whether democracy can be “restored”, but whether a new political project can emerge to replace the exhausted model of elite-managed liberalism. The old order is collapsing, but the new has yet to be born. In this vacuum, anything can happen.

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