According to many political theorists, Brazil did everything right after the corrupt and unpopular Jair Bolsonaro was voted out of office in October 2022. He attempted a January 6–like coup after his opponent was sworn in, which included plans to kill incoming President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. It failed, and Bolsonaro was convicted of multiple felonies and sentenced to 27 years in prisonin 2025—effectively a life sentence for a 70-year-old man.
Then, last week, Brazil basically voted Lula out of office in favor of Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio Bolsonaro. Flávio promises to free his father, remove all the current Supreme Court justices and replace them with his own, and generally carry on the brutal and corrupt policies of his father. There will be a runoff October 25, but Bolsonaro is widely expected to win it against his 80-year-old opponent.
In short, Brazilians, just like voters in the United States, went into an election knowing full well what they were getting and chose sadopopulism (i.e., an appeal to voters that a candidate will not so much help them as hurt the people they hate) over democracy.
To most external observers, the right-wing demagogue looks like a buffoon selling magical thinking. He claims that he alone can solve everything with austerity, mass incarceration, centering society around conservative religion, and eliminating transgender people from public life. Somehow, people lose sight of the fact that they’re also voting for a justice system that shields the president’s supporters from any legal accountability, no matter what they do, while weaponizing said system against his political opponents.
The supporters of the autocrat ignore these things for a variety of reasons. Some assume that, although Trump is an incompetent idiot, their Trumpist leader will do much better despite embracing the same sorts of policies. Others don’t believe the new leader will be corrupt. Worse yet, many accept the corruption because it will benefit “their” side, even if it doesn’t benefit them personally, or even if it hurts them.
The appeal of sadopopulism is a corollary to Adam Serwer’s observation that the cruelty is the point: For these voters, the main attraction is that the president hurts the people they hate as much as possible.
This phenomenon is not limited to the United States and Brazil. In Germany, the pro-Russian and neo-fascist Alternative for Germany Party, or AfD, is surging, while the center-right coalition led by Chancellor Friederich Merz is increasingly weak and unpopular. This situation resembles the Franz von Papen government that preceded Hitler in the Weimar Republic. Germany will hold its next federal election in January 2027, and the AfD is expected to win a plurality of the votes.
France’s Emmanuel Macron is a lame duck, and his coalition is collapsing too. Despite being convicted of felony embezzlement, Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally party was gifted the opportunity to run in the April 2027 federal elections by the court system, much the way Trump was. As a result, she is widely expected to win.
Both the AfD and National Rally are running on virtually identical platforms: pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine, mass deportations of immigrants, tax cuts for the wealthy, centering conservative religion in society, austerity for the poor, long mandatory sentencing, rejecting the EU and NATO, banning same-sex marriage, and forcing transgender people out of public life.
It’s not just France and Germany, though. Reform UK would be the second-most preferred party if elections were held today (they must be held by 2029). Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Croatia are all in the middle of a democratic backslide toward right-wing autocracy.
There are many overlapping theories as to why democracy is faring so poorly in so many places. Many states suffer from a gap between formal rights and the rule of law, where public resources are coopted for personal wealth and political status. Another potential cause is massive wealth inequality leading to oligarchy and disillusionment among voters. Heightened ideological, ethnic, and religious polarization creates deep distrust in democratic institutions and mainstream political parties, pushing people toward demagogues promising miracles.
Consolidated authoritarian regimes like China and Russia have grown more brazen in domestic repression and more influential internationally through multipolar alliances and economic leverage (such as the 10-member BRICS formed in 2009). Simultaneously, traditional Western democracies have faced internal crises, political friction, and a reduced capacity or willingness to champion global democratic norms. Regardless of the cause or causes, the quantitative evidence shows that this is clearly happening worldwide.
According to the 2026 Report on Global Democracy created by the Varieties of Democracy, or V-Dem, project, which seeks to conceptualize, measure, and provide detailed data on democracy around the world, there are 92 autocracies and 87 democracies worldwide. Seventy-four percent of the global population (about six billion people) live under autocracy, while only 7 percent live in liberal democracies, the worst it has been since 1978. Currently, 44 nations (representing 41 percent of the global population) are becoming more autocratic, while only 18 countries are improving.
Six out of 10 of the new countries in the process of becoming autocratic are in North America and Europe. These include the United States, the U.K., Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Croatia. V-Dem reports that the U.S. dropped from a liberal democracy to an electoral democracy, with its ranking falling from twentieth to fifty-first out of 179 nations amid rapid executive power concentration and attacks on judicial and media checks. Ironically, one of the very few “areas for hope” that the report listed was Brazil’s previous rejection of Jair Bolsonaro.
It is worth pointing out that all these new autocracies are right-wing, conservative movements. There are no Bolshevik or Marxist revolutions taking place; it’s all ethno-nationalism, selling sadopopulism to the portion of the public that feels it is no longer centered by society in an increasingly cosmopolitan world. As much as these people would like solutions, what they want even more is revenge. They want someone powerful to come in and brutalize the people they blame for their perceived loss of special status as “the right sort of person” now that immigrants, brown people, Muslims, and queers are no longer universally considered “the wrong sort.”
When did electing right-wing authoritarians ever work out well? They all seem to wallow in corruption, nepotism, grift, graft, and generally enriching themselves and their top-level cronies at the expense of the population. The law applies only to the everyday person and, of course, applies double to the regime’s political enemies. Let’s not forget the pointless wars that both the U.S. and Russia started and can’t back themselves out of, which threaten them with economic ruin.
Even if they do win these conflicts, the damage to their economies and prestige will linger for decades. Russia just surpassed 1.5 million casualties for the war in Ukraine, and the Pentagon is currently hemming and hawing about how many wounded and killed there have been in the war with Iran.
In the end analysis, it all feels so stupid. People have willingly traded away their say in government, a functioning economy, affordable cost of living and housing, and national prestige and maybe even sent their kids off to war in exchange for making some other people even more miserable than they already are. Incredibly, tragically, there will always be about a third of the population that looks at this trade, in retrospect, and says, “Yeah, it was totally worth it.”
It is hard to imagine, but in just a few years there will be up to a hundred million Americans who look back at Trump’s second term as a “golden age” and will go right back to voting for the next, even more far-right, aspiring autocrat. Sadly, people around the world will also look back at their own prior leaders, like Bolsonaro, Duda, Orbán, Duterte, and even Putin, and regard them as scions of a better, mythical past. This is how fascism keeps coming back repeatedly to haunt the next generation.