DEMOCRACY: AN ENDURING ASPIRATION

In hybrid regimes, elections still happen and can still matter, but the playing field has been tilted, meaning they no longer function as a reliable check on power. Judiciaries are compromised, media landscapes skewed and opposition forces structurally disadvantaged. In 2025, several countries on this ambiguous middle ground moved further from democracy as their leaders and ruling parties used legal mechanisms such as constitutional amendments, criminal charges and judicial appointments to reduce institutional checks, disqualify opponents and entrench their hold on power. They invariably presented these as democratic, technocratic or anti-corruption measures.

In March 2025, the Turkish government arrested Ekrem İmamoğlu, elected mayor of Istanbul, winner of the opposition primary and the only politician polling ahead of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the 2028 presidential race. Corruption and terrorism charges were accompanied by the annulment of his university degree, aimed at barring him from running.

In Georgia, amid ongoing democracy protests, the government of the right-wing populist Georgian Dream party froze the bank accounts of leading civil society organisations and jailed seven opposition leaders, accusing them of financing group violence and sabotage. The crackdown followed a February 2025 European Parliament resolution declaring the Georgian parliament illegitimate due to manoeuvres used in the 2024 election, including voter ID confiscation and fraudulent electoral practices. Furthering its isolation, the government held municipal elections in October without European observation.

In El Salvador, Congress abolished presidential term limits, allowing President Nayib Bukele to potentially rule indefinitely. With over 80,000 people detained under a prolonged state of emergency, a foreign agents law targeting civil society and independent media and an agreement with the Trump administration to house US deportees in El Salvador’s mega-prison, Bukele demonstrated that authoritarianism can receive genuine popular approval.

Mexico held the world’s first popular election of an entire federal judiciary, with the government presenting the process as a democratisation of justice. But turnout was just 13 per cent, and observers documented widespread irregularities, with several winning candidates having credible links to organised crime. The changes might be better characterised as judicial capture dressed as democratic innovation, a template with dangerous potential for replication.

Tunisia, birthplace of the Arab Spring uprisings and once a democratic success story, continued its descent under President Kais Saied. Since winning Tunisia’s last truly competitive election in 2019, Saied has methodically dismantled democracy from within, rewriting the constitution to give himself near-absolute power and stage-managing elections to eliminate meaningful competition. In 2025, a court convicted 21 opposition figures on vague terrorism charges and issued shockingly long sentences following a trial observers described as a grave injustice. Fourteen civil society groups faced asset freezes and suspensions. The EU, bound to Saied by a migration control deal, remains largely silent.

A succession of recent elections produced results that were determined long before voting began. Authoritarian rulers barred, jailed or forced into exile opposition leaders who might threaten their power. Ruling parties controlled electoral bodies and courts. Turnout figures were frequently implausible, counts were never independent and results were often faked. Many such elections were met with protests, which were usually violently suppressed. The international community said little, signalling to authoritarian leaders that stage-managed elections can still provide a serviceable veneer of legitimacy.

Protesters hold a sign reading ‘We no longer want a dictatorship’ at a demonstration against electoral fraud in Douala, Cameroon, on 26 October 2025. Photo by Zohra Bensemra/Reuters via Gallo Images

In Africa, four elections followed this pattern in rapid succession. Cameroon’s electoral machinery secured a seventh term for Paul Biya, in power since 1982. The government packed key bodies with supporters, prevented the main opposition candidate standing and unleashed lethal violence against post-election protests. In Côte d’Ivoire, President Alassane Ouattara won a constitutionally questionable fourth term after authorities disqualified major opposition candidates and banned protests. In Tanzania, President Samia Suluhu Hassan secured re-election in a process stripped of all meaningful competition: the main opposition party was banned from standing, its leader detained on treason charges and a further candidate ruled ineligible. African Union observers documented ballot stuffing, internet restrictions and political abductions. Uganda opened 2026 with an election that confirmed Yoweri Museveni’s seventh presidential term. The vote was accompanied by a nationwide internet shutdown and the abduction of opposition figures.

A member of the Belarusian diaspora carries a placard depicting President Alexander Lukashenko at a rally against the election farce in Warsaw, Poland, on 26 January 2025. Photo by Sergei Gapon/AFP via Getty Images

Biya, aged 92, and Museveni and Ouattara, both in their 80s, rule over some of the youngest populations on earth. Generational chasms such as these have the potential to trigger many more Gen Z-led protests.

Belarus, under President Alexander Lukashenko’s grip since 1994, held a presidential election under conditions that made the outcome a foregone conclusion. Anyone who might have posed a credible threat is in jail or in exile, and the level of repression was such that there were no protests and virtually no opposition.

In the Middle East, similar dynamics were seen in Iraq, where a parliamentary election took place against a backdrop of severe civic space restrictions that made it an exercise in elite power distribution rather than a genuine competition.

Since 2020, Africa has experienced 11 successful coups across nine countries, mostly clustered in a ‘coup belt’ across the Sahel region. Military takeovers are typically presented as necessary to combat jihadist insurgency, uproot corruption and resolve political stalemates. In 2025, two more countries came under military control through markedly different routes.

In Madagascar, the army unit that brought President Andry Rajoelina to power in 2009 forced him out amid widespread Gen Z-led protests sparked by water and electricity shortages. In Guinea-Bissau, a coup disrupted proceedings a day before election results were expected, a manoeuvre civil society and international observers condemned as orchestrated by President Umaro Sissoco Embaló to avoid electoral defeat. Benin survived an attempted coup in December.

Elsewhere, juntas consolidated their power. In Mali, five years after General Assimi Goïta took over, the junta dissolved all political parties, imposed punitive fees on independent media, used cybercrime laws against critics and extended Goïta’s mandate until 2030. In Burkina Faso, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, in power since 2022, postponed elections until 2029, dissolved the independent electoral commission and oversaw arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances and forced military conscription of activists and journalists. His latest step, in February 2026, was to dissolve all political parties. The security situation both juntas used to justify their takeover has continued to deteriorate.

While some juntas simply refused to leave, others consolidated their power through the ballot box. In Chad, Mahamat Idriss Déby, who seized power in a coup when rebels killed his father in 2021, predictably won the 2024 presidential election following a campaign marred by violence, including the killing of an opposition leader. In 2025, he firmed up his control, with parliament abolishing presidential term limits and extending terms from five to seven years, potentially allowing him to rule for life.

In Gabon, General Brice Oligui Nguema, who overthrew dictator Ali Bongo in August 2023, won the presidential election, claiming to have taken over 90 per cent of the vote. A subsequent parliamentary election further concentrated power in his hands. In Guinea, the military held a presidential election with major opposition figures excluded, exiled or imprisoned, allowing coup leader Mamady Doumbouya to transition from junta leader to elected president. The vote came after repeated delays and protests that were met with repression, and followed a constitutional referendum that removed restrictions on junta members running for office and extended presidential terms.

Supporters display campaign signs in Conakry, Guinea, on 3 November 2025, as military leader Mamadi Doumbouya submits his candidacy for the December presidential election. Photo by Luc Gnago/Reuters via Gallo Images

The mechanisms were consistent. States withdrew from international accountability: Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger left the Economic Community of West African States and the International Criminal Court, forming their own Alliance of Sahel States. Juntas systematically repressed civic space through tactics such as arbitrary detentions and enforced disappearances. Leaders benefited from propaganda campaigns, exemplified by Burkina Faso’s social media operations promoting Traoré as a visionary pan-African leader. Such moves took place within an increasingly permissive international environment, including an African Union unable or unwilling to enforce anti-coup mechanisms.

Similar dynamics played out in Myanmar. Four years after the coup that brought it to power, and despite controlling under a quarter of the country’s territory and continuing to wage war against ethnic militias and pro-democracy forces, the military junta held a sham election in an attempt to legitimise its rule. The international environment proved helpful to the junta, with China, India and Russia supplying weapons and aid while shielding it from accountability, the Trump administration reversing course on sanctions and cutting funding for independent media and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations persisting with a diplomatic approach that has demonstrably failed.

Across regions and regimes, states have increasingly turned to law as a tool of repression, exploiting its appearance of legitimacy to suppress civil society organisations that hold them to account. A particularly effective instrument is the foreign agents law. Such laws require civil society and media organisations that receive international funding to register as foreign agents, a label carrying deliberate connotations of disloyalty and espionage. Framed as transparency measures, they function as tools of political control.

2025 saw foreign agents laws passed in El Salvador, Slovakia and Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina, while proposals advanced in Hungary and Serbia. Recent laws share common elements, such as mandatory registration, stigmatising labels, heavy fines and restrictions on advocacy. The law passed in Republika Srpska, later suspended by the Constitutional Court, explicitly banned foreign-funded groups from ‘influencing public opinion’. Slovakia’s version, adopted after street protests and EU pressure forced the removal of the ‘foreign agent’ label, retained onerous reporting requirements and ministerial oversight. El Salvador’s law went furthest, imposing a punitive 30 per cent tax on all foreign grants alongside registration requirements and broad restrictions on political activity.

In Hungary, where Fidesz fears losing the 2026 election, the government introduced a bill to grant the Sovereignty Protection Office sweeping powers to blacklist, defund and dissolve organisations that receive foreign funding. A parliamentary vote on the bill has been postponed following protests and international condemnation. In Serbia, a bill requiring organisations that receive over half their funding from foreign sources to register as foreign agents was submitted to parliament in late 2024 but awaits a vote. Bulgaria’s parliament rejected a similar proposal initiated by a pro-Russia party for the fifth time in 2025.

Beyond foreign agents laws, governments are deploying a wider range of restrictive measures. NGO legislation was adopted or advanced in 2025 in countries including Ecuador, Ethiopia, Peru, Zambia and Zimbabwe, following a common template of mandatory registration, expanded government monitoring of activities and funding and powers to suspend or dissolve organisations on vague security or public interest grounds. Authorities have also advanced laws restricting the right to protest, including in the UK, where the Crime and Policing Bill, currently before parliament, grants police extensive new powers over protests, including provisions on exclusion zones, face coverings and cumulative disruption from repeated protests. Human rights groups describe it as one of the worst-ever attacks on protest rights.

Together, these laws reduce the space available to those who monitor elections, document abuses and demand accountability. Civil society calls on the UN to respond by establishing a Special Rapporteur on Democracy, arguing that while the UN monitors specific rights through specialised mechanisms, democratic freedoms receive no systematic international oversight.

Authoritarian states also pursue their critics across borders, abducting, harassing, killing and spying on activists, journalists and political dissidents who’ve sought safety in exile. While dozens of states use transnational repression tactics, 10 are responsible for around 80 per cent of all direct physical incidents recorded. China remains by far the most prolific perpetrator, followed by Russia, Turkey and Egypt.

A 2025 investigation found extensive surveillance by Chinese agents, online smear campaigns and harassment of family members living in China. In France, two Uyghur activists refiled a complaint with a Paris court alleging that the Chinese embassy orchestrated attacks, surveillance and threats against them during a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping. Hong Kong democracy activists in exile are specifically targeted, with at least 19 subject to a bounty and police targeting their families back home.

A key tool of Russia’s transnational repression is the in absentia conviction, which allows the state to sentence exiled critics and place them on wanted lists that restrict their freedom of movement. In 2026, Moscow courts sentenced exiled TV Rain journalist Yekaterina Kotrikadze to eight years in prison for posting about Russian war crimes on her personal Telegram channel, and London-based restaurateur Yevgeny Chichvarkin to nine years for sharing an anti-war statement on Instagram. Both were convicted of spreading ‘war fakes’ and violating Russia’s foreign agents law.

Egypt’s transnational repression combines administrative, digital, legal and physical tactics. Digital attacks include phishing, spyware and social media smear campaigns, while security agents monitor and harass activists in European cities and authorities arrest and harass relatives back home. In 2025, family members of diaspora protesters who chained embassy gates shut in protest at Egypt’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza were jailed in retaliation. The state has also weaponised administrative and legal mechanisms, denying consular services, withholding passports and leaving children stateless. Authorities place activists on terrorism lists that freeze their finances, flag them at borders and sentence them in absentia.

Turkey similarly uses administrative and legal tools for transnational repression. In 2025, a classified memo revealed that its Security Directorate General covertly sought to circumvent Interpol rules to secure an arrest warrant against a Turkish journalist who’d been granted asylum in Sweden. Turkey also shows how repressive states can support each other: in April 2025, acting on a Turkmenistan government request, Turkish police detained bloggers and human rights activists Abdulla Orusov and Alisher Sahatov on false terrorism charges. Despite a Turkish Supreme Court ruling that returning them would endanger their lives, the two were reportedly secretly flown to Turkmenistan, their circumstances unknown.

Costa Rican police conduct an operation to arrest suspects in the assassination of Nicaraguan dissident Roberto Samcam in San José, Costa Rica, on 12 September 2025. Photo by Ezequiel Becerra/AFP

Tactics can include lethal violence. In 2025, Cambodian opposition politician Lim Kimya was assassinated in Thailand. This was one of many instances across Southeast Asia, a zone of collaborative repression where governments actively assist or tacitly enable each other in targeting dissidents on their territory, in exchange for reciprocal treatment of their critics living in exile.

The same pattern is taking hold in the Americas. Roberto Samcam, a retired army major turned outspoken critic of Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega, was shot dead in Costa Rica in June. Two exiled Venezuelan human rights activists were shot in Colombia in October. They survived, but the attack had a chilling effect among the Venezuelan diaspora.

Every successful act of transnational repression sends a message about the reach of the state and the limits of safety. Democratic governments that fail to investigate, prosecute and publicly condemn these operations on their territory are complicit. States should strengthen legal protections for exiled activists and work with diaspora communities. In November 2025, the European Parliament adopted its first report on transnational repression, calling for European sanctions against the states involved.

Democratic regression is accelerating. But there are positives. Albania extended the franchise by introducing diaspora voting. Samoa held one of the most competitive elections in its history. Moldova’s moderate ruling party retained power despite a sophisticated Russian interference campaign combining cyberattacks, disinformation and illicit funding, with civil society playing an essential role in protecting electoral integrity. Australia and Canada both rejected Trump-aligned politics in elections where the US government’s conduct was a key campaign issue, defying the pattern of incumbents losing over cost-of-living concerns. Following a December 2024 constitutional crisis when a politically embattled president attempted to impose martial law, only to be stopped by mass protests, South Korea elected a new president with a mandate for change.

In many countries, elections gave people genuine opportunities to express deep economic grievances and political frustration. This was seen in Bolivia, where the October presidential election gave power to an opposition party for the first time in two decades, achieving a peaceful transition amid the worst economic crisis in a generation. There and elsewhere, civil society played vital roles in protecting electoral integrity.

Moments of potential democratic opening have come in countries where there long seemed little hope. In Syria, the December 2024 collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime ended five decades of dynastic authoritarian rule, creating a fragile but real opportunity for transition. In Somalia, a political agreement resulted in the introduction of direct elections for federal lawmakers, a potential shift from the country’s entrenched clan-based power structures, though with significant opposition and limited time to implement it.

People take part in a No Kings protest against US President Donald Trump’s policies in Chicago, USA, on 18 October 2025. Photo by Jim Vondruska/Reuters via Gallo Images

All year long, people put themselves on the line to demand and defend democracy. In the USA, millions took to the streets to resist Trump’s authoritarianism, with the No Kings movement applying the country’s founding rejection of monarchical rule to contemporary concerns about executive overreach. Hundreds of thousands mobilised in Germany, first against the government’s decision to pass anti-migration legislation with AfD support, which broke the consensus against cooperation with the far right, then against the AfD ahead of the federal election. In France and the Netherlands, tens of thousands marched against racism and far-right policies. People took to the streets in France again to support a court verdict that found far-right leader Marine Le Pen guilty of embezzling European public funds and declared her ineligible to stand in the 2027 presidential election.

In Turkey, İmamoğlu’s politically motivated arrest triggered a nationwide Gen Z-led uprising against Erdoğan’s decades-long dismantling of democratic institutions. Despite violent repression, in June Georgia marked 200 consecutive days of protests calling for a rerun of the fraudulent 2024 election and restoration of the country’s plans to join the EU. In Togo, the arrest of a popular rapper sparked the 6 June Movement, mobilising a generation that has never known democracy but refuses to accept almost six decades of dynastic rule.

A student holds a flare at a protest against the detention of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu in Istanbul, Turkey, on 21 March 2025. Photo by Umit Bektas/Reuters via Gallo Images

Authoritarian leaders who used elections to entrench their power also faced protests, typically responding with violence. In Côte d’Ivoire, opposition supporters took to the streets months before the October election to protest against the exclusion of the two main opposition candidates, leading to some 700 arrests and 80 prison sentences, while 11 people were killed. In Tanzania, security forces killed hundreds when protests erupted following the undemocratic election. In Cameroon, the state used lethal force against post-election protests. In Uganda, security forces killed at least 30 opposition protesters and detained 2,000, while Museveni’s son, head of the army, publicly threatened to kill the main opposition candidate.

In Iran, widespread protests erupted on 28 December, with people demanding the end of the theocratic regime. Triggered by a sharp depreciation of the currency and accelerating inflation, the movement rapidly expanded into a direct challenge to the ruling elite’s legitimacy. Authorities responded by killing thousands of protesters, detaining tens of thousands and, once the streets were clear, handing death sentences to protesters.

Around the world, millions of people have shown they believe democracy is something worth risking their lives for. The question is whether these instances of resistance can coalesce into sustained pressure for democratic renewal, or whether regressive trends will continue to deepen. Much will depend on whether international institutions can uphold the norms they’ve spent decades building, and on whether civil society can resist the restrictions closing in around it to keep democratic aspirations alive.