How democratic institutions have begun to curb the advance of the far right
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Democracies are not only âresistingâ the far right; they are learning to defend the conditions that make the vote genuinely free. In the United States, Donald Trumpâs erosion is not merely statistical: the escalation of migration enforcement, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations and nationwide protests reveal the political costs of governing through intimidation and narrative manipulation. In parallel, fissures are emerging within the Republican Party itself.
Beyond the US, the pattern appears through different channels: in Brazil, a judicial response to coup plotting; in France, Marine Le Penâs ineligibility; in Germany, the logic of militant democracy; and in Hungria and PolĂłnia, the external decision by the UniĂŁo Europeia to impose consequences when the rule of law is eroded.
The thesis is simple and uncomfortable: when disinformation becomes strategy and the public sphere fractures, democracy cannot be reduced to electoral procedure. It needs âimmunitaryâ mechanisms â internal and external â to prevent lies from capturing the very mechanism of choice. The boundary is delicate, but ignoring it can be fatal.
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A year ago, Donald Trump returned to the White House triumphant with under 50% of the popular vote and a majority in the Electoral College. He promised to be the âpresident of peaceâ, the man who would end wars and restore American greatness. By late November 2025, his approval rating had fallen to 36% in a Gallup pollâthe lowest point of his second termâand 60% of Americans disapproved of his performance. The reversal is stark: he began the term at 47% approval and 48% disapproval; by November he stood at 36% approval and 60% disapproval. Among independents, only 25% approve of him. The figure who had become the model and catalyst for far-right movements worldwide now sees his base fragmenting.
One visible component of this erosion has a concrete catalyst: the escalation of migration policy and the machinery of deportation. In January 2026, two deaths in Minneapolis involving federal agents during an enforcement operationâtwo American citizens shot in incidents whose official accounts were immediately challenged by videos and documentsâtriggered large-scale protests and student walkouts, from Minnesota to both coasts. A Reuters/Ipsos poll recorded 58% of respondents saying that ICE had âgone too farâ, with Trumpâs approval on immigration falling to 39% and his overall approval to 38%. The Department of Homeland Securityâs responseâannouncing body cameras for agents in Minneapolisâwas already a sign of political cost and of lost narrative control.
The decline is not confined to polling. In Congress, fissures have multiplied. Five Republican senatorsâLisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, Josh Hawley, Susan Collins and Todd Youngâvoted with Democrats to advance a war-powers resolution intended to limit new military action in Venezuela. Seventeen Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against Trumpâs position on health subsidies. In Indiana, 21 Republican state senators rejected the redistricting plan the president had demanded. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, until then a vocal ally of the president, was blunt: âI think the dam is breaking.â Thom Tillis announced that he will not seek re-election after clashes with the president. In Congress, initiatives have emerged to prevent federal funding for any attempt to annex Greenland. The fear of Trumpist primaries, which for years paralysed the party, is beginning to give way to fear of losing the midterm elections.
In the streets, popular resistance has reached historic proportions. The âNo Kingsâ protests mobilised, according to several independent estimates, between 4 and 6 million people in the United States in June 2025; in October, organisers claimed around 7 million (with other estimates placing participation at roughly 5 to 6.5 million). Either way, it was one of the largest single-day protests in the countryâs recent history. Organisers are now preparing a third wave for 28 March 2026, with the stated ambition of mobilising up to 9 million participants. Professor Erica Chenoweth of Harvard University notes that these protests differ from those of the first term: they are more geographically dispersed, reaching into counties that voted for Trump, and they have displayed a persistence the earlier wave did not.
The electoral consequences are palpable. A November 2025 NPR/PBS News/Marist poll showed Democrats with a 14-point lead over Republicans in congressional vote intentionâthe largest since 2017, at precisely the point in Trumpâs first term that preceded the Democratic wave of 2018, which cost Republicans 40 seats. Among independents, the gap is particularly pronounced. âThe warning signs for Republicans are enormous,â the pollâs analysis concluded.
This pattern of institutional and popular resistance is not uniquely American. On the contrary, it appears to be crystallising simultaneously across several democracies that have faced the advance of authoritarian populist movementsâoften inspired or encouraged by Trump himself. The cases of Brazil, France, Germany and Hungary reveal a shared dynamic: when electoral routes prove insufficient to contain threats to democratic norms, judicial and administrative institutionsâand, in some contexts, external bodies with the power to impose consequencesâmove into action.
In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro is serving his sentence in a Federal Police facility in BrasĂlia. On 11 September 2025, the Supreme Federal Court sentenced him to 27 years and three monthsâ imprisonment for attempted coupâa plan that included the assassination of President Lula, Vice-President Alckmin and Minister Alexandre de Moraes. On 22 November, after violating his electronic ankle monitor and attempting to flee, Bolsonaro was arrested. On 8 January 2026, exactly three years after his supporters stormed the seats of the three branches of government, Lula vetoed a bill passed by Congress that would have drastically reduced Bolsonaroâs sentence, writing: âIn the name of the future, we have no right to forget the past.â In parallel, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Minister de Moraesâlater liftedâand announced 50% tariffs on Brazilian products, later partially rolled back. Brazil did not back down.
In France, Marine Le Pen faces a different but equally consequential fate. On 31 March 2025, a Paris court convicted her of misappropriating European Parliament funds between 2004 and 2016. The sentenceâfour yearsâ imprisonment, two of them to be served under electronic tagging, a âŹ100,000 fine, and five years of ineligibility with immediate effectâsent shockwaves through French politics. Le Pen, who had been leading all polls for the 2027 presidential election, was barred from standing. Judge BĂ©nĂ©dicte de Perthuis was explicit: Le Pen was âat the heart of a systemâ that amounted to âa serious and lasting attack on democratic rulesâ. The appeal hearing began on 13 January 2026; a decision is expected in the summer. Trump called the conviction âa major eventâ and compared it to his own legal cases.
In Germany, the institutional response has taken a distinct form. On 2 May 2025, the Bundesamt fĂŒr Verfassungsschutzâthe domestic agency charged with protecting the constitutional orderâclassified the Alternative fĂŒr Deutschland as a âconfirmed right-wing extremist entityâ, on the basis of a 1,100-page report documenting anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric deemed incompatible with the constitutional requirement of âhuman dignityâ. The classification enables enhanced surveillance, the use of informants, and the monitoring of communications. Following a legal challenge, the agency temporarily suspended the public label while the court considers the case, without removing the substantive debate about the reportâs foundations. A political and legal debate is under way that could culminate in an application to the Constitutional Court to ban the partyâsomething that has happened only twice since the Second World War. This is Germanyâs notion of streitbare Demokratie, âmilitant democracyâ: the state may defend itself against internal threats to its democratic foundations.
In Hungary, the institutional counteroffensive takes a less dramatic, but politically more revealing form: the decision by an external institution to impose costs on an illiberal drift. The visible instrument is budgetaryâsuspension and freezing of fundsâbut the central point is not âfinanceâ as such; it is the institutional choice to condition access to common resources on respect for minimal rule-of-law guarantees. After the Council suspended around âŹ6.3 billion in cohesion commitments, the persistence of the impasse led, in early 2026, to the loss of more than âŹ1 billion in EU funding whose eligibility deadline expired. It is a form of self-defence that does not depend on the vote: not because it replaces elections, but because it refusesâwithout conditionsâto fund the erosion of the rules that make democratic cooperation possible.
In Poland, this type of external constraint was among the first large-scale European trials of the approach. For years, the European Union made access to disbursements under the Recovery and Resilience Facility conditionalâand kept funds withheldâin response to judicial reforms deemed incompatible with judicial independence and the rule of law. The message was the same: political and budgetary cooperation cannot be neutral in the face of the erosion of the guarantees that sustain the democratic order itself.
The American administrationâs reaction to these measures was hostile in every case. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the AfD classification âtyranny in disguiseâ; Vice-President JD Vance accused Germany of ârebuilding the Berlin Wallâ. The German Foreign Office responded tersely: âWe have learned from our history that far-right extremism must be stopped. This is democracy.â International solidarity among far-right leadersâGeert Wilders, Matteo Salvini, Viktor OrbĂĄn, Elon Musk and Bolsonaro himself expressed support for Le Penâdid not alter the course of the institutions that acted.
The data demand interpretative caution, yet they also reveal something that exceeds the conjuncture. In the United States, despite Trumpâs decline, Republicans retain control of Congress and the White House. The AfD won 20.8% in Germanyâs February 2025 federal election and leads some polls. Bolsonaro remains an influential political figure in Brazil, even in prison. Le Penâs Rassemblement National retains its electorate. These movements are not disappearing; in some cases, they continue to grow. What the data show is not a public-opinion âturnâ against the far right. It is something more structural: an unprecedented activation of institutional mechanismsâjudicial convictions, administrative classifications, disqualifications from office, parliamentary resistanceâthat operate outside strictly electoral logic. Democracies are defending themselves through instruments that transcend the electoral procedure itself.
The question imposes itself: why now? The answer lies in what these movements do to the democratic mechanism itself. A study published in January 2025 by researchers from the University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit, analysing 32 million parliamentary posts across 26 countries over six years, reached a conclusion that ought to be unsettling: disinformation is not an accidental by-product of social media but a deliberate political strategy of right-wing radical populist parties. Neither left populism nor the traditional right shows a significant correlation with the dissemination of false information. Only radical populist right parties do. The study documents how these movements exploit the crisis of trust in institutions, create alternative media ecosystems, and use disinformation as a tool to destabilise democracies and gain electoral advantage. In the United States, a 2024 PRRI survey found that 19% of Americans believe core QAnon theoriesâand among Republican Trump supporters, the figure rises to 32%. A substantial portion of the Republican electorate continues to sustain the narrative that the 2020 election was âstolenâ, despite the absence of credible evidence.
Here the problem becomes philosophical. Democracy presupposes informed citizens who make rational choices on the basis of facts. It is not merely a tally of preferences: it is a decision regime anchored in a minimally shared public sphere. If information is systematically distorted, if lies are disseminated as political strategy, choices cease to be genuinely free. A vote grounded in falsehoods is not a genuinely democratic voteâit is the capture of the democratic mechanism by those who seek to destroy it. Truth cannot be held hostage by the lie. Allowing the lie to prevail through the vote is allowing democracy to be turned against itself.
In 1945, Karl Popper formulated the paradox of tolerance: a society that is unlimitedly tolerant will inevitably be destroyed by the intolerant. A democracy that tolerates anti-democrats to the end becomes complicit in its own dissolution. For decades, this principle remained largely theoretical in Western democracies. What 2025 and 2026 demonstrate is its coordinated practical applicationâand the reason is precisely this: when the vote itself is manipulated through systematic disinformation, to wait for electoral victories to correct the course is to wait for the disease to cure itself. Germans call it streitbare Demokratieâmilitant democracyâand inscribed it into the Basic Law after the Weimar experience. But the current phenomenon is broader: multiple democracies, simultaneously, activating self-defence mechanisms that do not depend on the vote. Trump in the White House with 36% approval and fissures within his own party. Bolsonaro in a cell in BrasĂlia. Le Pen barred from standing. The AfD under constitutional scrutiny. Millions in the streets shouting âNo Kingsâ. The paradox is resolved as follows:
And perhaps it is here that a necessary evolution becomes visibleânot by historical destiny, but by functional necessity. In an era in which disinformation is strategy and the public sphere fragments, democracy cannot be reduced to electoral procedure; it must protect the conditions that make the vote free and meaningful. This entails an immunitary dimension: internal and external mechanisms that do not replace popular choice, but prevent systematic lying from capturing the mechanism of choice itself.
The boundary is delicate. If these restraints detach from criteria of proportionality, due process, transparency and judicial oversight, self-defence degenerates into punitive technocracy. But when they are activated to defend the integrity of the public sphere and the reversibility of power, they are not âless democracyâ: they are democracy preventing its openness from being used to destroy it.
Democracy, to survive, cannot be merely democratic. It needs institutions capable of acting when truth is under attackâand when the popular vote is precisely the instrument of that attack. It is an uncomfortable conclusion. But it may be the only honest conclusion this historical moment allows.