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The protests are happening. Mass demonstrations took place across Turkey after authorities arrested and detained Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul and leading challenger to long-ruling President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in a move that seemed to cement the country’s transition toward autocracy. Protesters convened in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in a bid to thwart Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from removing the top official of the Shin Bet, the country’s domestic intelligence agency, as part of his own gambit for retaining power.
But they seem to be fighting against the tide in an age where authoritarian politics are only gaining ground. The latest report by the V-Dem Institute, which tracks the health of democracies in more than 200 countries around the world, found that nearly three quarters of the world’s population live in societies categorized as “autocracies” — the highest proportion since 1978, per its calculations. For the first time in more than two decades, it categorized more societies as autocracies than democracies.
The United States is part of that story of democratic backsliding. The Trump administration’s stunning purge of federal bureaucracy, its pressure tactics on universities, and the dubious legality of its more brazen attempts to wield executive power are taking the country into uncharted territory. Aziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago, recently told the New York Times that the White House’s efforts were shifting the country “into a completely different kind of constitutional order, one that’s no longer characterized by laws that bind officials and that can be enforced,” but where the law “becomes a tool to harm enemies” yet does not “bind those who govern.”
“The USA now seems to be heading towards a transition away from democracy under President Trump,” Staffan I. Lindberg, the lead political scientist involved in the compilation of V-Dem’s analysis, said in a statement. “In my view, the reverberations of this are and will be enormous across the world.”
The ripple effects are already on show. Netanyahu’s critics see his maneuvers to ax Ronen Bar, the Shin Bet director, as part of a broader play to quell corruption investigations involving his rule as well as inquiries into Israel’s failures to prevent the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by militant group Hamas. The spat pits Netanyahu and his allies against the law and the workings of Israel’s independent judiciary.
“Amid other challenges to Israel’s liberal character, this turn of events could further erode the country’s standing within the international community,” noted Shalom Lipner of the Atlantic Council. “Inspired reportedly by the campaign of U.S. President Donald Trump — whose disruptive rhetoric he is emulating closely — to slot loyalists into key administration positions, Netanyahu is poised to continue purging Israel’s professional ranks.”
On Wednesday, Netanyahu explicitly linked himself to Trump’s legal battles. “In America and in Israel, when a strong right wing leader wins an election, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people’s will,” Netanyahu posted on social media. “They won’t win in either place!”
In Erdogan’s Turkey,an old and genuine “deep state” has long since been purged and aligned with the president’s right-wing nationalist government. Now, the powers-that-be are using their undue influence over the courts and other major civic institutions to eliminate Imamoglu as a potential threat to Erdogan and his ruling party. Imamoglu and dozens of other people were arrested on corruption charges that officials in his Republican People’s Party, or CHP, decried as trumped up. For good measure, Imamoglu’s university diploma was also annulled by Istanbul University over vague irregularities — another move, critics believed, used by the government to disqualify the popular politician from competing in future elections.
Analysts and onlookers noted the muted international response to developments. “Erdogan aims to end Imamoglu’s political career, but does he not worry about global pushback? No!” wrote Soner Cagaptay, a Turkey scholar based in Washington. “Erdogan is a keen zeitgeist-reader, and has cast Turkey as a key partner to global players from Syria, to Ukraine, to great power competition, that none should criticize him.”
Significant criticism won’t be coming from the Trump administration, which has deprioritized advocacy for democracy around the world as it seeks to overhaul U.S. government at home.
“America doesn’t care as it used to. Human rights, rule of law, equality, freedoms — it’s not top of the agenda any more,” Bilal Bilici, a Turkish parliamentarian from Imamoglu’s party, told me. He pointed to an emerging context where “autocrats feel encouraged, and are giving more space to their autocratic counterparts. It’s a shocking and slippery path.”
Turkey is often seen in the same light as Hungary**,** where illiberal nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban has consolidated his party’s grip in power and bent independent institutions — from the press to the courts — to do his bidding. The echoes in Washington are getting louder.
“They are copying the path taken by other would-be dictators like Viktor Orban,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) told the Guardian last month about Trump and his allies. “You have a move towards state-controlled media. You have a judiciary and law enforcement that seems poised to prioritize the prosecution of political opponents. You have the executive seizure of spending power so the leader and only the leader gets to dictate who gets money.”
Leaders like Orban, Netanyahu, Erdogan and Trump are unruffled by such criticism — and often feel validation because of it. They see themselves locked in an existential clash with a fading liberal establishment that they broadly view as illegitimate or compromised. For Orban, that establishment is embodied in the workings of the European Union — a bloc also reviled by Trump and U.S. right-wingers.
Orban has delighted in Trump’s ascent, which has sent jitters across the continent and led to the beginnings of a dramatic rapprochement between the United States and Russia. “The E.U. is floundering, and it does not know whether it has a future, and if so, what it will consist of,” Orban said this week. “The United States has the power and the means, while the Union has none.”
Nationalists and autocrats are more comfortable seeing the world through the prism of great power competition, and Trump has made no secret of his distaste for open-ended alliance commitments and the liberal values that undergird the transatlantic relationship. “I can say with a high degree of confidence that Presidents Putin and Trump understand each other well, trust each other and intend to gradually move along the path of normalizing Russian-American relations,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday. “As for the new world order, President [Vladimir] Putin has always talked about the need to build relations based on mutual respect, mutual trust and mutual benefit. This is what is happening now.”
For the United States’ traditional partners in liberal democracies, it’s a befuddling moment. “This script is clearly hard for U.S. allies to follow,” wrote European foreign policy analysts Sophia Besch and Jeremy Shapiro. “It is not their habit to deal with the United States on the basis of power. It goes against every norm of the Atlantic alliance and the habit of 80 years. But those norms of behavior may in fact be the reason that Trump reserves his most aggressive rhetoric for U.S. allies.”