Donald Trump preposterously claimed to have effected “regime change” in Iran by replacing autocratic père Khamenei with even more autocratic fils Khamenei. Not that the country’s much put-upon people will have noticed the change.

Hungary this week saw real regime change. The sweeping, very welcome defeat of Trump ally Viktor Orbán after 16 years in power marks not just a change of figurehead but a qualitative change of system, a real turnaround from descent into autocracy and corrupt state capture. In an index of human freedom from the Cato Institute, Hungary’s ranking fell from 31st in 2010 to 67th in 2023, the lowest among EU countries.

Orbán’s defeat is a win for democracy and the rule of law in Hungary, for EU decision-making and for the future of Ukraine. Crucially, it may also mark a turning point in a 25-year worldwide slide through autocracy on the road to outright dictatorship.

Orbán has become a standard bearer, and Hungary a success model, for what he calls illiberal democracy. This is reflected globally in the advance of far-right nationalist populism that closely follows his and Trump’s remarkably similar playbook.

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He represents the vanguard of the autocratising tendencies that have swept through Europe in the aftermath of his hero Silvio Berlusconi and the austerity crisis of 2008.

Some movements are already in power – Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy – while others, from France’s National Rally to Germany’s AfD and Britain’s Reform UK, are growing in electoral strength.

Scandinavia, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain and Slovakia have all seen the right move closer to power.

Democratic standards have retreated globally, as one recent comprehensive study records, back below 1978 levels – not least in Trump’s US, which has lost its long-term status as a liberal democracy for the first time in more than 50 years.

[ Hungary after Orbán: the daunting work of dismantling a captured stateOpens in new window ]

The V-Dem Institute in Gothenburg‘s annual Democracy Report for 2025, bringing together the work of 4,200 international experts, finds the world at year-end ruled by 92 autocracies (74 per cent of global population) and 87 democracies. Just a third of these democracies – Ireland is one – get the cleanest bill of health as “liberal democracies”.

Freedom House estimates that since 2005, 19 countries with “partly free” status have dropped to “not free”, swelling the ranks of the world’s autocracies, which have become more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad.

V-Dem is concerned less with such rankings than with the direction of travel, from democracy by degrees of autocracy. There has been a continuing alarming decline in almost all measures of democracy during 2½ decades of what it calls the “third age of autocra­tisation”. The increasingly volatile world is reflected in the number of countries in regime transformation, up to 62 in 2025 from 44 a decade ago. It has never before seen as many countries simultaneously autocratising.

Freedom of expression has been worst hit: in 2000, 52 coun­tries were improving their record, while by 2025, 44 were seeing declines. Measures of freedom of association, freedom from torture, media censorship and fair elections all disimproved. Nearly a quarter of the world’s nations, 44 countries, are on the list of “autocratisers”, including seven EU member states and two of its main allies – the UK and the US. Among the new autocratisers in 2025 were five Europeans: Croatia, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia and the UK. Only Poland – in the “bad boy” camp with Hungary for some years – rejoined the democratisers. Among autocratising EU members are Croatia, Hun­gary, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

The change in the US status is the most dramatic – within the year its democracy index declined 24 points, and its world ranking fell from 20th to 51st place out of 179 nations.

The withering of legislative constraints – particularly congressional oversight of Trump, as was the case for Orbán – has been the most pronounced aspect of democratic decline. In the US, V‑Dem estimates this measure fell by about a third in 2025, reaching its lowest point for more than 100 years. Both men have used their parliamentary majorities to block attempts by parliamentarians to assert legislative prerogatives or oversight. Both packed the courts with yes-men, and turned the state into personal moneymaking machines.

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“Under the Trump administration, democracy has been rolled back as much during just one year as it took Modi in India and Erdogan in Turkey 10 years to accomplish, and Orbán in Hungary four years,” says Staffan Lindberg, the V-Dem Institute’s founding director.

Eventually defeated by an alienated voter base – resulting in what observers call an election swing “too big to rig” – Orbán’s defeat may not represent a turning of the tide. But it has demonstrated the internal contradictions in regimes or movements that notionally aspire to embody democratic values while gradually extinguishing them. There is nothing inevitable about their rise. They can be defeated – or the line held against them – by democratic means.

Orbán is just the first. Trump, with any luck, may follow.

© The Irish Times