Dramatic day in Praha as Matej scored own goal
A familiar tale of World Cup playoff agony awaited the Republic of Ireland in Prague, but this was no hard luck story. Heimir Hallgrímsson’s team twice had the Czech Republic where they wanted them, in normal time and in a penalty shootout, and twice they let them off the hook. Dreams of a first World Cup in 24 years evaporated as a consequence.
Jan Kliment - Češí žíjí, mistrovství světa je zase o
Czech Republic win 4-3 on penalties.
We must not underestimate the peril for democracy
Donald Trump’s America is a world leader in democratic decline
Democracy is in grave peril, worldwide. This is the message of two authoritative recent reports — one, from Sweden’s V-Dem, subtitled “Unraveling The Democratic Era?” and the other, from Freedom House in the US, subtitled “The Growing Shadow of Autocracy”. These make two fundamental points. The first is that what Stanford’s Larry Diamond has labelled a “democratic recession”, which began two decades ago, is beginning to look dangerously like a democratic depression. The other is that, in 2025, the Trump administration launched what turned out to be the swiftest decline in the health of any significant democracy in recent times.
According to Freedom House, “global freedom declined for the 20th consecutive year in 2025. A total of 54 countries experienced deterioration in their political rights and civil liberties, while only 35 countries registered improvements.” V-Dem measures this decline not only by the number of countries affected, but also by the number of people affected. It concludes that between 2005 and 2025, the proportion of the world’s population living in autocracies has risen from 50 to 74 per cent and the proportion living in true liberal democracies, which offer the full panoply of civil and legal rights, in addition to elections, has collapsed from 17 to just 7 per cent. Above all, argues V-Dem, the world has never before seen as many countries “autocratizing” at the same time. Freedom of expression is declining particularly quickly, with 44 countries registering a decline in 2025. Even torture is increasingly employed.
Most important, this has also been happening in the US. V-Dem’s aggregate index of the health of US democracy is back to 1965 levels, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet this time we see a classic example of an attempt by an executive to overthrow a liberal democracy from within. Legislative constraints on the executive — arguably, the most fundamental constitutional constraint of all — have, in V-Dem’s view, reached their lowest point in 100 years. Civil rights and equality before the law have fallen to the levels of the mid-1960s and, notwithstanding the blather about “free speech”, freedom of expression is at its lowest level since the early 1950s. Only the electoral components of democracy are, it judges, untouched, at least so far.
For those who doubt this, I recommend reading the Trump Action Tracker, which lists 2,816 actions taken since January 2025. Perhaps the most blatant aspect of what is happening is the brazenness of the corruption. The long-fought-for idea that public office is a trust, not an opportunity for personal enrichment, has been almost entirely abandoned. Some argue, plausibly alas, that insiders have even been able to trade profitably on prior knowledge of presidential announcements, such as that this week withdrawing threats against Iran.
What does this all add up to? According to Freedom House, the quality of US democracy is now at the same level as South Africa’s, though the latter’s has been improving, not deteriorating. According to V-Dem, the sheer speed of US deterioration in 2025 far surpassed those in Russia, India, Turkey or Hungary at the beginning of their decline. If a similar decline in V-Dem’s index of liberal democracy occurred in 2026, the US would be where Hungary was in 2018 and would have got there far faster.
Unfortunately none of these other declines have been reversed, so far. This is because these would-be autocrats know well that they cannot afford to lose elections and have achieved enough power to prevent it. The first motivation must already apply to Donald Trump, his family and many members of the administration. Does anybody doubt, then, that the administration will do whatever it can to “win” the midterm elections in November, no doubt claiming all the while that they are only trying to ensure “fair” elections? Will they succeed? We shall see.
In the history of humanity, democracy of any form is a rarity, especially in large powers. Far more common is autocracy, oligarchy, or some combination of the two. It is only in the late 20th century that democracy became some kind of global norm. The US played the decisive role in this success, by virtue of both its power and its example.
The power still stands, though the Trump administration is mounting an assault on its foundations in the rule of law, safe property rights, effective government, advanced science and freedom of the media. The example does not. To the world, the US is daily demonstrating its repudiation of the values people thought it represented. Particularly in developing countries, but also in many others, people are all too familiar with what Trump’s US stands for: despotism. The US was never close to being a perfect exemplar of democratic ideals. But they were what the world came to believe America stood for.
With the US led by people who despise the enlightenment tradition that created today’s western civilisation (which is not the one they imagine), where will we end up? We do not know. Maybe US democracy will manage to save itself. Maybe the sheer ferocity of the assault will create the needed response. Alas, Europe remains divided among and within its members and so today lacks the will to defend democracy worldwide. The remainder of the world’s true democracies are also too weak to do much in this age of autocrats.
Yet I refuse to despair. The notions that the state belongs not to an absolute ruler but to the people, that they must be allowed to speak and be heard, that the law exists to protect them, and that nobody can be entrusted with absolute power over them remain, in my view, the greatest in politics. But it would be folly to believe these are safe. They are, once again, in the gravest danger.
