Do recent electoral setbacks for right-wing parties signal a turning of the illiberal tide?

Paris: These are hard times for illiberal regimes. Last April, Hungarians ended Viktor Orban's 16 yrs in power, handing Peter Magyar's Tisza Party 138 of 199 seats. On October 25, a student-led list defeated Aleksandar Vucic's Progressive Party, ending 14 yrs of dominance in Serbia. The same day, Lula held off Flavio Bolsonaro in Brazil's run-off. Two days later, Benjamin Netanyahu's bloc in Israel fell from 68 seats to 53, and his rival Gadi Eisenkot has been asked to form a government. Last week, Americans handed both houses of Congress to Democrats in a historic rebuke to Trump's Republicans.

These elections bear significance, as all 5 have been prominent cases of what political scientists Anna Luhrmann and Staffan I Lindberg have termed the 'third wave of autocratisation', a global decline of democracy since the mid-1990s. By their definition, an illiberal regime wins power through competitive elections, then uses it to hollow out the checks on that power: independent courts, a free press, minority rights and a level playing field. Elections still matter. But they are no longer fair.

On that account, the 5 countries are not exactly alike. Hungary and Serbia were electoral autocracies. Israel and the US are democracies under strain. And, in Brazil, the Bolsonaros were challengers, not incumbents. But most of them were laboratories of illiberal politics that has marked the past decade.


Orban wrote the playbook, a model for Trump, MAGA and conservatives everywhere. The Bolsonaros transposed it to Brazil. Vucic ran a more conventional right-wing autocracy. These leaders also openly backed one another, and their capitals were meeting points of the transnational far Right. J D Vance flew to Budapest days before Hungary voted. Trump endorsed Orban, Bolsonaro and Netanyahu.

3 factors unite these electoral outcomes:

Economic grievance The US-Israel war on Iran and the oil shock squeezed household budgets. But the anger also reflects decades of deepening inequality that incumbents promised to fix and did not.

Communication In most of these countries, though not all, youth-led protests or opposition campaigns mastered the game. Serbia's students sustained 2 yrs of protest with a Gen-Z fluency in online mobilisation that the regime could neither match nor suppress.

In the US, Democrats at last found messages on living costs that connected with voters. In Brazil, Lula's comeback owed much to 'Lula's Army', a giant WhatsApp channel that organised both digital and ground campaigning.

Overcoming an uneven playing field Most challengers were outspent. In Hungary, they also won against constituencies redrawn by Fidesz. Which meant Tisza needed roughly 5 percentage points more than Orban's party to secure a simple majority. In the US, Democrats won despite gerrymandering that deepened Republican advantage in red states.

Is this the beginning of a global backlash against autocratisation? Not quite. Those who turned against these regimes were not all marching for democracy. Their motives were a mix of bread-and-butter worries, anxieties about opportunities squeezed by systemic unfairness and rise of AI, and a dawning realisation that illiberal governments were not delivering. Magyar campaigned on hospitals and public transport as much as on the rule of law.

The strongman's bargain is always transactional: surrender some freedoms in exchange for order, protection and prosperity. When the prosperity failed to arrive, and protection looked like cronyism, the bargain collapsed. Lula's margin was wafer-thin after he trailed in the first round. Netanyahu and Vucic have both cried foul. The illiberal Right has lost elections. But it has not lost all its voters, or its potency.

What, then, produced these upsets? A particular combination: economic pain the regime could no longer blame on others, a visible record of malfeasance and incompetence, and a challenger credible to the regime's own voters. Above all, major swings require more than mobilising one's base. Enough voters must change how they normally vote, as Orban's voters did once a former Fidesz insider gave them permission to defect.

What does this mean for India? Caution, first. There is still a chasm between protest politics and what it takes to defeat a government that, while on the defensive, retains formidable advantages in resources and organisational capacity. Nor is there much scope to unite parties, and social movements or unions, which have sharply declined. Lula's victory rested on the coordinated mobilisation of party members, supporters and unions. India's opposition still lacks that connective tissue.

Yet, the main lesson is that campaigning on democratic norms and on bread-and-butter issues need not be a choice. Illiberal regimes reject accountability, and unchecked power breeds abuse, corruption and inefficiency. Captured institutions and dismantled counter-powers are why contracts go to cronies, public services decay and failures go unpunished.

Oppositions must show this direct connection between people's struggles and flaws of their democracy. It must also say plainly that blaming foreigners, 'illegals' or immigration is a diversion. They do not cause these economic woes or undermine political systems. Autocrats do.

The writer is a political scientist, CERI, Sciences Po Paris. Views are personal