
Inside Orbán’s Plan to Occupy Europe
The Hungarian prime minister is on a mission to overrun Brussels, disrupt the EU, and consolidate his power at home. It just might work.
1933 Results
The Hungarian prime minister is on a mission to overrun Brussels, disrupt the EU, and consolidate his power at home. It just might work.
July 2022, Volume 33, Issue 3
The case of Hungary shows how autocrats can rig elections legally, using legislative majorities to change the law and neutralize the opposition at every turn, no matter what strategy they adopt.
July 2015, Volume 26, Issue 3
Favored by global conditions that lean their way, authoritarians have been busy over the last decade coming up with new and inventive ways to thwart the global advance of democracy and human rights.
Across Europe — from Spain to Germany and Sweden to Italy — right-wing parties are gaining ground. The following Journal of Democracy essays, free for a limited time, cover the European far right’s recent successes, and what they mean for the region’s democratic future.
October 2015, Volume 26, Issue 4
Excerpts from: remarks by Nigeria's new president Muhammadu Buhari; statement by Azerbaijani investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova; statements on abuses against lawyers and activists in China
October 2018, Volume 29, Issue 4
A review of Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly by Safwan M. Masri.
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
President Alvaro Uribe’s time in office was marked by disturbing trends that included a spike in extrajudicial killings and an attempt to overthrow term limits, but the country’s institutions of horizontal accountability proved remarkably resilient.
October 2012, Volume 23, Issue 4
The hardest work of the transition—negotiating political pacts—has not yet begun. Burma’s democrats must help to forge a system of mutual security that can allow democratization to proceed.
July 2024, Volume 35, Issue 3
Georgian Luka Gviniashvili on protesting the foreign-agent bill; a speech by Evgenia Kara-Murza to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe; an Iranian rapper denounces Toomaj Salehi’s death sentence; Carl Gershman on Mário Soares and the fiftieth anniversary of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution; a Ugandan political prisoner’s court-martial hearing; María Corina Machado wins the Global…
April 2020, Volume 31, Issue 2
Sub-Saharan African governments are clamping down on media freedom. More surprising is how many of their citizens appear to support this attack on the press.
October 2013, Volume 24, Issue 4
Excerpts from: Russian anticorruption crusader and Moscow mayoral candidate Alexei Navalny’s speech; presidential contender Nana Akufo-Addo’s speech conceding the race to John Dramani Mahama and Mahama’s address; remarks by jailed Chinese human-rights activist Xu Zhiyong and essay dedicated to him by lawyer and human-rights activist Teng Biao.
April 2025, Volume 36, Issue 2
A Ukrainian human-rights lawyer on moral responsibility during war; Nilofar Shidmehr’s poem “Say Her Name: Mahsa Jina Amini”; a Cuban prodemocracy activist vows to never give up; Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya on Belarus’s sham election; a Zimbabwean journalist turns himself in to police; the frontlines of the protests in Georgia; and an open letter to Xi Jinping.
January 2023, Volume 34, Issue 1
When Vladimir Putin launched a massive invasion of Ukraine, he expected an easy victory. Instead, the world has witnessed an object lesson in how a corrupt Russian regime crippled its own military power.
April 2014, Volume 25, Issue 2
In severely divided societies, ethnic cleavages tend to produce ethnic parties and ethnic voting. Power-sharing institutions can ameliorate this problem, but attempts to establish such institutions, whether based on a consociational or a centripetal model, face formidable difficulties.
January 2024, Volume 35, Issue 1
Can a strong, independent supreme court serve as a guarantor of democracy? In Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, judges are showing a surprising resolve in fending off their countries’ antidemocratic forces.
January 2002, Volume 13, Issue 1
Excerpts from: British prime minister Tony Blair’s speech on the events of September 11 and their aftermath; the “Inter-American Democratic Charter” adopted by the Organization of American States; UN secretary-general Kofi Annan’s speech accepting the National Democratic Institute’s Averell Harriman Award; Bangladesh Nationalist Party leader and Prime Minister Khaleda Zia’s “Speech for the Nation.”
July 2017, Volume 28, Issue 3
Since Tanzania’s 2015 elections, rising repression and opposition protest have displaced an older dynamic of comparatively restrained and unchallenged dominance by the ruling party.
It is almost a year since the death of Alexei Navalny. The Russian opposition leader sought to channel Russian nationalism as a challenge to Putin’s autocracy. He gave everything in the fight.
Russia’s dictator lives in fear. He knows the Russian people don’t support him. He can’t even muster a street rally without bribes or threats. No number of fake elections will change that.