October 2026, Volume 37, Issue 4
Opposition parties cannot defeat backsliding incumbents alone, but big united fronts often fail, too. The important choice lies between unity coalitions and quiet ones—and knowing which to choose can make all the difference.
October 2026, Volume 37, Issue 4
Autocrats look invincible until their allies start to walk away. Defections have brought down regimes from Guatemala to Hungary, and they can be engineered: Raise the costs of standing with the autocrat and ease the path out.
October 2026, Volume 37, Issue 4
Social media inspired revolutions that autocrats quickly smothered. Digital payments are different: Rulers cannot switch them off without ruining their own economies. Quietly, they enrich citizens, broaden markets, and build the foundations for a freer society.
October 2026, Volume 37, Issue 4
Bureaucrats who slow-walk, leak, and refuse to cooperate have long been democracy’s quiet sentinels. But autocrats armed with AI surveillance will root them out—unless democracies build new legal shields around the administrative state.
What “Leaderless” Actually Means | Kinuthia Ndung’u and Wanjira Wanjiru
Gen Z protests are about more than a generation. Uprisings like the one we helped lead in Kenya are rewriting how movements organize, and how states fight back.
Zambia’s Authoritarian Turn | Wiriranai Brilliant Masara
Hakainde Hichilema came to power five years ago promising to restore Zambia’s democracy. But his government now commits the very abuses he once railed against.
Why Germany’s Mainstream Parties Have Lost Their Way| Justin Daniels and Luca Siepmann
The country’s far right is connecting with voters where they live. Germany’s mainstream parties need to borrow from that playbook and become a presence in the communities they hope to lead.
News & Updates
October 2026
Today the chief threat to democracy comes not from generals in the streets but from elected leaders dismantling it from within.
September 2026
For the first time since the party’s founding in 2013, the “firewall” that has kept the far right out of German government is trembling. Can it hold? And what does the AfD’s breakthrough reveal about the health of democracy across Europe?
Most Read
The United States has slid into competitive authoritarianism. The slide has been modest and remains reversible—but it is real. Even after Donald Trump, American democracy will remain fragile.
Forget his excuses. Russia’s autocrat doesn’t worry about NATO. What terrifies him is the prospect of a flourishing Ukrainian democracy.
Old-fashioned military coups and blatant election-day fraud are becoming mercifully rarer these days, but other, subtler forms of democratic regression are a growing problem that demands more attention.
Americans have never been angrier with one another. But polarization is not the disease—it is the response to a revanchist movement seeking to roll back sixty years of social progress.
The “crisis” of democracy is a crisis of representation. New parties, some of which are populist in troublingly illiberal ways, are arising from this moment. The danger that they pose is not that they are antidemocratic, but that they are…
A Monthly Column
The Frontline
By Kinuthia Ndung’u and Wanjira Wanjiru
Read our entire October 2025 issue, featuring “What Democracy Does … and Does Not Do” by Maya Tudor.
