It has been a bad week for democracy. In fact it has been a bad year for democracy. The only exception is the UK. But don’t worry Britain’s time will come.

Now, however, the rise of the populist far-right just about everywhere else is dominating the world’s headlines. Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally is knocking on France’s gates to power. A conservative-dominated US Supreme Court has granted serial law breaker and liar Donald Trump immunity from prosecution. A cognitively-impaired Joe Biden is endangering democracy by clinging to power. A far-right anti-immigrant government has been formed in the Netherlands.

And those are only the most recent examples. In Israel, Hungary, India, Slovakia, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Austria, and Germany the far-right is either in government or growing in power and influence.

So how did we get here and where are we going?

Back in the naughty nineties everything looked so different. The collapse of the Soviet Empire appeared to be a great victory for liberal democracy, globalism, free markets and capitalism. We won, and countries around the world flocked to democracy’s banner.

First in the queue were the members of the old Soviet system, with Russia right at the front. That was the first problem. The transition from a Soviet-style command economy and from dictatorship to democracy was more difficult than envisaged.

A broken system was replaced not with capitalist prosperity but with hyper-inflation, economic breakdown and mass unemployment. Life expectancy in Russia fell with up to five million excess adult deaths between 1991 and 2001. Birth rates collapsed and organized crime grabbed the levers of power.

A conflict quickly emerged between two groups of reformers – those who supported strong executive power and those in favour of parliamentary or representative rule. The former won. Disillusionment with Western-style democracy became so widespread that Vladimir Putin was able to win election in 2000 under the slogan “the dictatorship of law.”

The Soviet experience was mirrored in most of its former East European satellites. Hungary’s Viktor Orban founded Fidesz as a radical liberal student movement backed by George Soros. But the political and economic chaos of the 1990s moved him from the centre left to the centre right and finally the far right. The liberal philanthropist George Soros who helped jump start Orban’s political career became a hate figure as Orban embraced “illiberal democracy.” His prototype of elected strong-man rule became the model for the world’s right-wing populists.

On September 11, 2001 Islamic terrorists flew their hijacked planes into New York’s twin towers and the Pentagon. Overnight the West’s attention shifted from the problems of Eastern Europe to the “War on Terror.” The result was fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan which lasted 20 years and cost more than a 10 trillion dollars. The cupboard was starting to run bare.

Then came the 2007-2009 world banking crisis. Greedy bankers are estimated to have cost US taxpayers $12.8 trillion. In Europe the banking crisis led to the Eurozone Crisis which brought the Euro to the brink of collapse and several European countries fell to their economic knees. The world financial system has yet to fully recover.

The banking crisis was immediately followed by the 2011 Arab Spring which sparked off civil wars in Syria and Libya. These combined with the consequences of climate change and spurred millions to risk their lives to cross the seas to safety in Europe. Growing economic and political problems elsewhere in the world provoked even more migration. In the US an estimated 650,000 illegal immigrants crossed America’s southern border between 2016 and 2023 alone.  The numbers of migrants in both Europe and America can only grow as at the end of 2023 the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported that there were a record 117.3 million displaced people in the world.

Populist politicians feed off fear and hate. Now they had the perfect scapegoat—migrants. Especially Muslim immigrants with a different religion, language and culture which the far-right claimed threatened to overwhelm their societies. In Britain, ruthless exploitation of the immigrant issue led to Brexit which, according to the London School of Economics, had by December 2021 cost UK households $7 billion in higher food bills alone.

Then on 17 November 2019 the first cases of Covid-19 were reported in Wuhan, China. By May 2022, the World Health Organisation reported that 15 million had died from the resultant pandemic. The financial cost was enormous. In America alone the price of lost business from lockdowns and support payments totalled more than $14 trillion. Governments around the world were being forced to borrow and debt as a proportion of GDP rose to alarming levels everywhere.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was the final ingredient in a perfect storm. It radically increased the prices of the basic commodities of grain, fertiliser, oil and gas. Inflation took off. In Britain the problem was compounded by the short, disastrous premiership of Liz Truss whose abrupt budget put the pound into a tailspin and raised interest rates to unaffordable levels.

Centrist governments and those marginally to the left and right appeared powerless to deal with events. More importantly, they were unable to invest in education and public services. Increasingly young people either turned away from politics altogether or towards extremism. In France on Sunday the political centre is being squeezed out by the extreme left and right. In America, Donald Trump is storming ahead of Joe Biden in the opinion polls.

On the surface, Thursday’s British general election, bucked the trend as the electorate ejected an increasingly right-wing Conservative government and handed power to a centre-left Labour Party. But a closer look reveals a darker picture. Voter turnout was at a 20-year low and 4 million voted for the far-right Reform Party whose leader—Nigel Farage– is linked to Putin, Trump and Viktor Orban. On top of that, there are insufficient funds in the British exchequer for the hoped for increased expenditure on public services after 14 years of conservative austerity. If Labour fails to deliver then there is a real danger that the British electorate will follow the example of the French, Italians, Americans, Germans, Dutch, Hungarians, Russians… and – in desperation – turn to the populist far right.

* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice. He also contributes to “The New World” magazine and lectures on world affairs. He is the author of “America Made in Britain,” two editions of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “The Falklands Crisis.”