We live in the age shaped by authoritarian strongman leaders. Consider Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. All played pioneering roles in the rise of polarising identity politics in recent years. All led major democracies at the turn of the decade and put those democracies under immense strain. All exhibited what the Venezuelan journalist Moisés Naím has called the “three Ps”, or populism, polarisation and post-truth.
Since then two (Trump and Bolsonaro) have lost power; one (Orbán) has held on to it; one has lost and regained it (Netanyahu); and one faces the first round of presidential elections on 14 May, after which he may well lose it (Erdoğan). It has even been claimed that the strongman surge has peaked. The American diplomat Samantha Power wrote earlier this year that “early 2022 may prove to be a high-water mark for authoritarianism”. That could be premature. But clearly the past few years have revealed something about how, and how not, to defeat a strongman leader in a democratic system.
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