I was born in West Germany in 1975. Yes, it was still West Germany then. The country was divided, Europe was divided, and much of the world lived under dictatorships.
A year before my birth, Portuguese soldiers overthrew their country’s dictatorship. The political scientist Samuel Huntington later called this the beginning of the “third wave” of democratisation, a surge of countries moving from dictatorship to democracy that would last decades.
That same decade, democracy took hold in Spain and Greece. It reached Latin America, then East Asia, then the entire communist bloc.
The Berlin Wall came down when I was fourteen, and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later. For my first three decades, freedom seemed to be winning.
In German, when you buy a return ticket, you ask for “einmal hin und zurück.” It means “there and back again.”
With the global spread of democracy, it has turned out exactly like that: Einmal Freiheit und zurück, a return ticket to freedom.
At least that is the conclusion of a new report by the Varieties of Democracy Institute, published last week. V-Dem is based at the University of Gothenburg. It tracks democratic change across 202 countries, drawing on more than 4,200 scholars to score each one from zero to one.
For the average person on earth, democracy is back to where it stood in 1978, before the third wave began.
Forty-four countries are sliding towards authoritarian rule right now. Seventy-four percent of the world’s population lives under autocracy.
In 2005, 17 percent of humanity lived in full democracies with protected civil liberties. Today that figure is seven percent, fewer than 600 million people, less than half the population of India.
Britain and the United States are among ten new countries added to the list of countries slipping away from liberal democracy this year, alongside Italy and several other EU member states. These are the countries that built modern democracy.
V-Dem says this decline is already wider than the democratic collapse of the 1930s. It has lasted longer too. Back then, a few countries fell apart dramatically, mostly in Europe. Today more countries are eroding slowly and slowly is harder to fight.
But what makes the 1930s comparison frightening is the economics, not only the politics. In fact, economic factors often drive shifts towards authoritarianism.
Germans did not flock to the Nazis out of sudden ideological conviction. They did so because the economy had collapsed and democracy seemed unable to fix it.
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 gutted confidence. Then America raised import tariffs across the board under the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, turning a domestic downturn into a worldwide depression. Millions lost their jobs and voted for whoever promised to tear the system down.
It was not just in Germany that this happened. In a 2016 paper in the European Economic Review, economists Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick and Christoph Trebesch examined more than 800 elections across 20 countries over 140 years.
Far-right parties gain roughly 30 percent more votes after financial crises that make people feel the whole system has failed them. The far-left gains nothing. Radicalisation runs in one direction only, towards parties that blame minorities and foreigners for the pain.
When people cannot pay their bills and see nothing getting better, they stop believing democratic government can help.
On V-Dem’s 2026 index, the country losing its democracy fastest is the United States.
Its score stood at 0.79 in 2023. By 2025, under Trump’s second term, it had fallen to 0.57 after attacks on press freedom, the politicisation of federal agencies and efforts to undermine judicial independence. That takes it back to 1965 levels and drops it from 20th to 51st out of 179 countries.
V-Dem’s founding director told reporters that Trump accomplished in a single year what took India’s Modi and Turkey’s Erdogan a decade, and Hungary’s Orban four years. The White House called V-Dem “an irrelevant, blatantly biased organization,” which rather proves V-Dem’s point.
America is losing its democracy and wrecking the global economy at the same time.
Trump’s tariffs briefly exceeded Smoot-Hawley levels last year, pushing the effective rate above 20 percent. The Supreme Court struck down the main tariffs in February, but Trump imposed new ones within days under a different law.
The effective rate has come down but remains the highest since the 1940s. The global economy depends on trade far more than it did in 1930, and the damage comes not just from the tariffs themselves but from the chaos surrounding them.
The war against Iran has pushed oil above $100 a barrel and nobody knows when it will come down. Funke, Schularick and Trebesch would recognise the pattern: Depression-era tariffs combined with an energy crisis rivalling the 1970s.
New Zealanders may feel this is all far away. V-Dem gives New Zealand a score of 0.79, ranking it 14th in the world.
That is a good score, but the United States had the same score in 2023. New Zealand’s democracy is healthy enough. A small trading nation, though, depends on what happens to democracy elsewhere.
But when America retreats behind tariff walls, oil prices spike from a war it started and the global economy fractures, New Zealand’s exporters lose markets and its diplomatic leverage shrinks. The rules-based trading system that allowed a country of five million to prosper has not looked this shaky since the Second World War.
All of it was built on open trade and the assumption that powerful countries would play by the rules. That order is now being taken apart by the country that created it.
I have spent my entire life on this return ticket. But I never wanted a return ticket. I had hoped for a one-way trip to a world of freedom, not a journey back to where I started. And certainly not a journey to the world my grandparents knew as teenagers.
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