Is Civil Society the New Battlefield for Democracy? Lessons and Strategies for Facing the Global Rise of Authoritarian Populism
Photo by Hunter Scott on Unsplash
The Global Character of Authoritarian Populism:
Changes in the political order—globally and nationally—are part and parcel of human history. In 2025, the process of becoming less and less inclusive and democratic is seemingly leaving no country unscathed. The arc of history is bending in the direction of othering and continued oppression. According to V-Dem, 2025 marks the 25th consecutive year of autocratization (that is, of the world becoming even less democratic). For the first time in 20 years, there are more autocracies than democracies, and if I am not mistaken, this just considers two regime types, leaving aside those that can now be considered mixed models, democratic in form, authoritarian in many practices. As IDEA’s team reports in The Global State of Democracy, “Representation, Rights, Rule of Law and Participation—the four pillars of democracy—are under strain, with unprecedented global declines in judicial independence, press freedom and electoral integrity.”
The trajectories towards more autocratic forms of governance look different across the globe, but share commonalities. This would suggest that counterstrategies can also be informed by shared learnings. Indeed, it is imperative to learn across contexts—not because events unfold identically everywhere, but because clear patterns and trends emerge, and both authoritarian leaders and the movements that rally behind them study one another and their historical predecessors. Drawing lessons and understanding from across contexts also means striving, as much as possible, to see what is actually underway in our own contexts with clear eyes—not falling into the comfortable illusion that things may change elsewhere, but not that much in our country. This is important not only for those in the United States—where it is well known that the past year has shown a tendency of residents to downplay real and startling transformations—but also in Europe, where the same dynamics are underway, even if perhaps with less theatrics.
In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán led a slow but steady constitutional erosion; at the EU-level, it’s seemingly happening through a reshaping of the agenda in a more nativist and exclusionary direction, facilitated by mainstream parties adopting at least part of the far-right agenda. In the U.S., many currents have been underway for decades, building upon a history of racialized violence, inequality, and corporate influence in politics (to name a few), but have greatly accelerated with Trump 2.0 and the swift implementation of Project 2025. Once authoritarian populists achieve power, many of the measures they implement look very similar. According to V-Dem, the favorite weapons of autocratizers are media censorship, followed by undermining elections and cracking down on civil society.
Confronted with this reality, political leaders and citizens intent on preventing either an extremist takeover or the consolidation of authoritarian power must navigate a series of strategic decisions. Reality is too contingent to assume truisms that hold everywhere. But at the same time, patterns in authoritarian populist strategies, and the dynamics that they set off, are undeniable, and we must all learn from lessons across time and context. Fortunately, we do have some initial answers to key questions: Among political leaders, is it more effective to mimic, confront, or ignore far-right rhetoric? What challenges do pro-democracy actors face once authoritarians are removed from power? What actions can we expect authoritarians to take with respect to civil society, and what role can civil society organizations–be it NGOs, faith-based communities, educational institutions, etc.–play?
Political Leaders: Imitate, Confront, or Ignore?
As the political successes of niche parties and authoritarian populists accumulated, many politicians, strategists, and scholars began to debate the most effective strategies to halt their advance. Comparative politics expert Bonnie M. Meguid identified three main approaches that mainstream parties tend to adopt: accommodative, adversarial, and dismissive strategies.
Accommodative strategies involve a party co-opting or mimicking the issue positions of a competitor in the belief that this will neutralize their appeal or attract their voters. Adversarial strategies consist of actively opposing them. Dismissive strategies, by contrast, entail non-action: “by not taking a position on the niche party’s issue, the mainstream party signals to voters that the issue lacks merit. If voters are persuaded that the niche party’s issue dimension is insignificant, they will not vote for it.” While Meguid originally developed these categories to analyze interactions between mainstream and niche parties, they can also be applied to actors—whether parties or organizations—both in government and in opposition.
Across Europe, many parties have opted to accommodate the far right on a range of issues, enabling researchers to assess how such strategies perform electorally. In a nutshell, growing evidence suggests that accommodation does not work—neither for conservatives nor for center-left parties.
In a pan-European study, a group of scholars investigated how accommodative strategies affect the success of radical right parties and whether they influence how people vote. The authors concluded that they did “not find any evidence that accommodative strategies reduce radical right support. If anything, our results suggest that they lead to more voters defecting to the radical right.” Looking specifically at mainstream parties adopting the radical right’s anti-immigration positions, they observed that voters are on average more likely to defect to the radical right when mainstream parties adopt far-right anti-immigrant or exclusionist discourse.
In the European context, the U.K. is one of the few countries where a center-left party won elections in 2024. As support for Labour plummets, many reasons explain the party’s unpopularity. In the spring of 2025, Prime Minister Keir Starmer made the speech “Island of Strangers,” in which he adopted much more stringent anti-migration rhetoric. If this was meant to neutralize surging support for the far-right party Reform, research revealed that the strategy failed massively. Voters did start to perceive Labour as more anti-immigration and right-leaning. However, as a result, support for the party declined. Starmer’s speech made Reform’s narratives on immigration more prominent while at the same time increased the negative assessments of how Labour is handling the issue.
It would be fair to conclude that mirroring authoritarian populist discourse does not prevent their success. Unfortunately, we have little evidence about how different adversarial or dismissive strategies perform, and I fear they are sometimes conflated. When polarization becomes a pervasive strategy—and public discourse itself polarized—completely ignoring an issue rarely works. If you leave a topic unaddressed, someone else will fill the vacuum, on their own terms.
At the same time, being adversarial often looks like an opposed response that still falls within the authoritarian’s frame. This does not simply come down to personal decisions. Both the narrative infrastructure and a system rife with incentives to antagonize and produce clickbait, rather than listen or be responsive to people’s material needs, demand that we both push leaders and reshape the structures that reward elites’ incentives.
Is it not possible, indeed necessary, to be more creative? Can we acknowledge real grievances while also seeking to shape narratives, public opinion, and circumstances—not just accept them as given—in ways that promote people’s wellbeing rather than deepen fear and hate?
At a time when the pool of narratives and policies from which political leadership draws seems extremely limited, maybe there is a unique opportunity for civil society organizations (beyond the usual political consultants and commentators) to shape the agenda by contributing true alternatives. This will also require that civil society organizations continue to evolve and are responsive both to the local and global nature of authoritarian cooperation.
Democratic Resilience?
What happens once authoritarian populists come to power and expand their control, as they do in competitive autocracies, but without fully consolidating it—thus still leaving room for competition? One could find comfort in the belief that another election might make it possible to replace them. Yet even if that happens, the evidence so far suggests a more complicated picture. In the paper “The Myth of Democratic Resilience,” an international trio of democracy scholars explored the ability of a political system to withstand authoritarian threats, and its capacity to adapt and become more democratic once authoritarians (or authoritarian wannabes) are removed from power. The authors found that since the 1990s, democracies barely ever bounce back (podcast with authors here). This is due to three factors:
Legal changes that introduce repressive legislation, especially when combined with personnel changes that place antidemocratic individuals in key positions, are incredibly hard to reverse (the current situation in Poland is a prime example);
Prodemocratic political leaders, parties, and coalitions, once in power, often have the desire, motives, and incentives to stay in power once they have won the election, and often resist giving up the extensive powers inherited from the previous administration. This often leads to the rupturing of existing coalitions (the situation in Poland comes to mind);
Finally, the conditions for strengthening democracy globally have continued to deteriorate.
We can see these dynamics play out in real time in Poland. In 2023, a pro-democracy coalition managed to defeat the authoritarian-nationalist party Law and Justice (PiS) party, which had been in power for the previous eight years. The new coalition government, however, has been struggling to undo the years of harm from the previous administration. Prime Minister Donald Tusk has also failed to deliver key reforms, perhaps delaying some of them as he had his sights on the 2025 presidential elections and feared alienating PiS voters (to refer to the previous points, perhaps accommodating?). As the presidential elections came around in 2025, the coalitions that had formed years before had fractured, the Law and Justice’s candidate became Poland’s new president.
These are all challenges that pro-democracy actors will have to confront elsewhere, challenges that demand developing a bridging muscle, skills in both coalition building and management, and humility. Who will be up to the task?
Is Civil Society the Answer?
When political parties and the executive, legislative, and judicial powers continue to fail, many turn to civil society. Authoritarians know that organized and capable civil society organizations pose a real challenge to their power. That is why, across the board, we see how they devote so much energy to cracking down on civil society organizations that oppose them through (but not exclusively) restrictions on protest rights, challenges to non-profit/NGO funding, and smear campaigns.
In the aftermath of the horrific assassination of American conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the Trump administration immediately used this tragedy as a pretext to attack NGOs and foundations. Yet here’s where I think it’s important to offer a word of caution. It is not true that authoritarians always aim to completely eradicate civil society. Sometimes, especially in countries where civil society is small, authoritarians may be able to quash or control it. But elsewhere, they will aim to co-opt and colonize it. This is as true now as it was in the past. The historical record shows that “fascism arose in societies with highly developed and rapidly developing civil societies, with a proliferation of associations, clubs, and organizations” which fascists co-opted. In pre-fascist Germany and Italy, civil society was highly developed. As fascists gained power within government, they bullied their way into this space too.
I am not prone to predictions, but I would dare expect that civil society becomes the next terrain of struggle, the space that authoritarian populists try to occupy and reshape, whether they are already in power or not yet (this podcast on “The Battle for Civil Society” is very good, even though highly academic). Vice President J.D. Vance’s language as he presented Charlie Kirk’s podcast suggests so. On the podcast, Vance pledged to crack down on the “radical left lunatics.” But another piece of the podcast stands out:
Get involved, get involved, get involved. It's the best way to honor Charlie's legacy. Start a chapter of TPUSA or get involved in the one that already exists. If you're older, volunteer for your local party, write an op-ed in your local paper.
Civil society as an ephemeral and vague entity is not a defense against authoritarianism (neither is the blanket criticism of civil society or drawing divides between NGOs and social movements). But a strong, independent, well-resourced network of civil society organizations committed to belonging and pluralism may still be the best antidote. The distinction I make here is not that these organizations must all look the same or share the same mission, but that they operate on a shared commitment to respect everyone’s dignity without exclusion.
As Yale Law professor John Fabian Witt states, “the way through will be to craft new modes of renewal adequate to the landscape of the world in which we find ourselves—forms analogous to the industrial union of the ’20s, and perhaps fueled by the generative civil society engine of the now vast nonprofit world [which in my view, includes social movements]. A century ago, in the forgotten history of a decade just barely out of living memory, we found pathways to a better place. The answer to how this all ends turns on experiments we have only barely begun to launch.” These new forms and networks will need to respond to the transnational and coalitional nature of authoritarian organizing—both among leaders and their supporting movements—as well as to malicious attacks on NGO resources and regulations, the criminalization of protest, and other, as yet unknown, forms of repression.
The future is not predetermined; we must rise to the challenge. As accommodative strategies continue to fail and authoritarian populist leaders gain and consolidate power, the task before us becomes clearer: civil society must mobilize not only against authoritarian regimes themselves but also against the elites and institutions that enable them through silence or complicity. This requires more than resistance—it calls for imagination and coordination. Civil society organizations committed to belonging and pluralism can play a crucial role in expanding the realm of possibilities, helping societies envision alternative futures grounded in dignity, equality, and shared well-being rather than fear and division—all while fighting to preserve an independent civic space not colonized by authoritarians.
Civil society organizations also have a key role to play once authoritarians are removed from power. They must be leading participants in pushing for not returning to the old days, but instead developing deeper and more expansive democracies rooted in belonging without othering—forms of democracy that have yet to be realized.
Continuing to Learn across Contexts with the Forum
Authoritarians’ crackdown on civil society is terrifying. But it can also backfire. We are starting to see cracks in their power and strategy. When Viktor Orbán, seeking to stage a show of force, tried to ban the Pride Parade in 2025, he was met with the largest anti-government mobilization since Fidesz came to power. I am curious to learn more about how this happened. What are the lessons that can be applied elsewhere? Similarly, what can we learn about the failures in Poland or the U.S.?
At the Forum, we have started to release a series of articles by practitioners that are trying to respond to the current times through innovation and bridging approaches. I’m curious to hear from you: do you have any examples? What’s working? What’s necessary?
In other news…
Politics in France are going à la italiana. Italy has had an average new cabinet every 13 months and 70 different governments since the end of World War II. Now, as the Italian government seems to stay in place, it appears as if French politics is trying to outpace Italia. Six different people have been prime ministers in the past three years. A month ago, François Bayrou lost a confidence vote–he resigned. Sébastien Lecornu came next–he resigned 26 days later. Only a few days passed, Macron reinstated Lecornu as prime minister again. By the time this is published, there will likely be new developments and perhaps even yet another new prime minister, unless Macron calls for anticipated parliamentary elections. Meanwhile, calls for him to resign continue unabated. If either parliamentary or presidential elections are called, we could well be facing a scenario where the far-right comes to power, shifting the European balance of power even further to the extreme.
Andrej Babiš, a populist oligarch and self-proclaimed “Trumpist,” has come back to power in the Czech Republic. Now, he will have to begin talks to form a governing coalition, following the trend in other European countries where authoritarian populists win elections but fall short of a majority. As reported in the BBC, “Babis has already begun talks with the two small right-wing eurosceptic parties that managed to pass the 5% threshold: the anti-Green Deal Motorists for Themselves, and the anti-immigrant Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) party, led by the Czech-Japanese entrepreneur Tomio Okamura.”
A few months ago, the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law released a report on The Future of Civil Societies.
Alex Evans’ newsletter, The Good Apocalypse, is fantastic. This piece, Cake or Death? Explains how local faith leaders and communities are helping to defuse far right protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers with cupcakes and cake (and much more).
And for the soul…
Anyone who reads me knows I have a soft spot for grandmas (especially mine). Here’s a day in the life of a 102-year old French yoga teacher.
I came across this quote from Albert Camus:
“My dear,
In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.
In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.
In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.
I realized, through it all, that…
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
Connecting the Dots: Musings on Bridging and Belonging is a monthly column by Míriam Juan-Torres. In it, Míriam reflects on current events, connecting the trends and considering the specificities across countries, applying a bridging and belonging lens and translating concepts from academia for a wider audience. Join our mailing list to stay up to date on the latest of the Democracy & Belonging Forum's curated analysis from Miriam and more.
Editor's note: The ideas expressed in this blog are not necessarily those of the Othering & Belonging Institute or UC Berkeley, but belong to the authors.