The world is in a persistent, multi-decade decline in democratic governance. Yet a few cases point the other way. Brazil’s courts held Jair Bolsonaro to account, and Hungarian voters ended Viktor Orbán’s sixteen-year rule in April 2026.

On October 14, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, Senior Fellow at FSI and Co-Director of the Democracy Action Lab, joined moderators Larry Diamond and Debra Satz for the second session in Stanford Continuing Studies' Reimagining Democracy speaker series produced in partnership with the Office of Community Engagement, the Stanford Democracy Hub, and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). They asked what these rebounds teach about democratic resilience, and how they might inform efforts to reimagine democracy in the United States.

Latin America: crime, inequality, and the question “What have you done for me lately?”

Diamond opened the discussion with a skeptical reading of the region. El Salvador under Nayib Bukele has become a byword for human rights abuses, but it is a small country. In Brazil, Flávio Bolsonaro is favored in this month’s presidential runoff and is widely expected to pardon his father. In Mexico, critics worry that Claudia Sheinbaum’s Morena party is rebuilding the one-party hegemony of the old PRI.

Díaz-Cayeros did not dismiss those concerns. “No party in any country should have a majority like the one Morena has,” he said, adding that such a majority “has been tremendously damaging for democracy.” Still, he cautioned against assuming the worst. Despite the temptations such a majority creates for Sheinbaum, he noted, many democratic spaces in Mexico have not closed. Even newly elected populists, such as Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia and Keiko Fujimori in Peru, face real checks and balances on what they can do.

The deeper drivers, he argued, are crime and unmet expectations. Criminal organizations are well armed, increasingly sophisticated — “even into the realm of drones” — and their violence spills across borders, as Ecuador learned when groups displaced from Colombia moved south. “Nobody really knows how to solve this, and anyone who claims they do is lying,” Díaz-Cayeros said. “But the right has been particularly successful in making a claim that they know how to do it better,” promising that mano dura will control the violence.

He also pointed to what Latin American democracies have achieved. Over the past two decades, countries across the region reduced extreme inequality through conditional cash transfers embraced by governments of both left and right. And when roughly eight million Venezuelans fled the Chavista regime, neighbors absorbed them: the Dominican Republic took in two to three hundred thousand, and Ecuador about half a million.

Yet governments have failed on basic health services and decent education, and citizens notice. On Brazil, Díaz-Cayeros contrasted Lula’s transformative first presidency, which opened universities to Afro-descendant Brazilians and expanded poverty programs, with a current term that has “not a lot to show.” Many Brazilians, he said, are rightly asking what democracy has brought them in the last four years. “Can’t a political system find a younger politician that appeals to voters?” he asked, a question he said applies to the United States as well.

Finally, he warned against reading authoritarianism through a Cold War lens. Venezuela under Delcy Rodríguez and Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega show that “authoritarianism doesn’t seem to have a political color. The destruction of democracy is equally possible by someone on the right and someone on the left.”

Europe: volatility, the cordon sanitaire, and a representation gap on immigration

Why do voters who feel unheard turn to leaders who are often corrupt and fail to deliver, Satz asked. Grzymala-Busse noted that no politician advertises themselves as corrupt. Populists run on a critique of the elites who came before, and in Europe they have often been able to deliver material gains. Fidesz “very ably targeted” vast EU subsidies to rural Hungary and made good on its promise to raise living standards. “That house of cards collapsed because the government was so corrupt. But for 16 years, it worked.” Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) government benefited from EU funds in the same way.

Asked whether Europe faces a long period of alternation between liberal and illiberal governments — as with Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic and Robert Fico in Slovakia, both of whom lost power and returned — Grzymala-Busse distinguished between East and West. Since 1989, post-communist Europe has had the highest electoral volatility of any region, including Latin America, so today’s swings partly continue an old pattern.

Western Europe faces a different problem: the elite cordon sanitaire. Outside Italy, where Giorgia Meloni governs, mainstream parties in Austria, Germany, and France have agreed to keep far-right populists out of power. “That bargain has held so far,” she said, “but when you have 30, 40 percent of the population voting for the AfD, how sustainable is that? How democratic is it to keep out of power the party that won the plurality of the vote?” The Alternative for Germany began in the early 2010s as an economists’ party opposed to the Greek bailout before an internal coup turned it into a nationalist, anti-immigrant force.

On immigration, she cited polling conducted with the Hoover Institution this summer. The top issue for European voters is not immigration but “public services and the economic situation — they care about the same stuff that voters everywhere care about.” Immigration, however, is the issue on which voters feel least represented. Supporters of center-right and center-left parties alike see their parties as far to their left; only right-wing populist voters feel aligned with their party.

She added that disinformation, much of it seeded by Russia, China, and Iran, takes hold because “the uptake is domestic.” In Europe, populists in power can also capture public broadcasters, as in Poland, where the equivalent of NPR “became a government propaganda channel.”

Rebuilding democracy is possible

How do democrats rebuild once they return to power? Grzymala-Busse contrasted Poland and Hungary. In Poland, Donald Tusk’s coalition defeated PiS in 2023, but a president from the illiberal camp has vetoed reform after reform. The sharpest problem is the judiciary, where the previous government appointed roughly a third of the judges. “They need to be dealt with democratically,” she said. “You cannot reestablish democracy through anti-democratic means.”

Hungary is “a much simpler story.” Péter Magyar and the Tisza party won a landslide and a parliamentary supermajority, and they are reversing Fidesz’s institutional changes while the EU releases more funds. “But that’s not really a lesson for other countries,” Grzymala-Busse cautioned, “because very few of them enjoy that kind of absolute landslide victory.”

Asked what citizens and institutions can do, she offered two lessons:

• Citizens must keep demanding and participating. “Autocrats really benefit from popular indifference, from popular alienation, and above all from popular despair.” Illiberal incumbents are defeated through landslides that cannot be denied.
   
• Oppositions must make corruption concrete. Calling a government anti-democratic “doesn’t get us very far.” What works is telling citizens that “this government’s corruption is costing you” better schools, better roads, and a better life.

Satz pressed further: democracy is not only an instrument for delivering goods but has value in itself, because it gives people control over their lives. Díaz-Cayeros agreed that this liberal dimension is what has been lost. Majoritarian impulses have eroded the sense that an independent judiciary or electoral authority matters “just because the people have voted.”

Grzymala-Busse said European democrats have succeeded by framing liberal values in patriotic terms: abandoning checks and balances is a betrayal of national history, and attacking the free press is an outrage “in the birthplace of the freedom of speech.” In the American context, she suggested, the equivalent message is that dismantling checks and balances or going after the media is un-American.

Díaz-Cayeros raised a further concern for the United States: its outsized influence on Latin American elections. In Peru and Colombia, he said, voters described how President Trump’s endorsements on Truth Social created echo chambers around favored candidates. He also warned about unregulated platforms. In Brazil, evidence suggests that anti-Bolsonaro outlets were disproportionately left exposed to cyberattacks, and the Facebook page of one of the last human rights organizations operating in El Salvador has been down for weeks.

How bad could it get?

To close, Diamond asked both speakers to look over the horizon. What if Marine Le Pen wins the French presidency and the AfD performs nationally as it has in eastern German states? What if Flávio Bolsonaro returns to power, pardons his father?

Grzymala-Busse was cautiously optimistic that Europe will not repeat the 1930s. Then, voters faced a choice between anti-democratic options on the far right and the far left, and the economic situation was far worse. Today, parties legitimate themselves through elections. Meloni also offers another path: “someone who makes very extreme statements while campaigning, but then once in office” governs as a conservative without violating democratic norms.

Díaz-Cayeros likewise doubted that Latin America would return to the era of military dictatorships and mass disappearances. The Bukele regime in El Salvador “is as bad as it can get,” he said, but Brazil’s federalism, vibrant civil society, and fifty-year human rights legacy make that model unlikely there. His greatest concern was global rather than national: “The Amazon is a humanity commons,” he said, and the world “should not let Flávio Bolsonaro burn the Amazon.”

Satz closed by returning to Grzymala-Busse’s call to demand and participate. Reining in illegitimate power, she said, depends on citizens who know their rights and refuse to feel hopeless or helpless.

The Reimagining Democracy series continues next week, when Brandice Canes-Wrone of the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions and Didi Kuo of CDDRL will discuss money, parties, and political reform.

Key takeaways

Listening to Grzymala-Busse and Díaz-Cayeros side by side, I came away with a few lessons that cut across both regions and that are extremely informative for those fighting for democracy anywhere.

1. Backsliding grows out of three gaps. Democracies falter when they fail to deliver, when mainstream parties ignore the issues voters care about most, such as immigration in Europe and crime in Latin America, and when majorities stop valuing courts, electoral bodies, and a free press. Illiberal leaders don’t create these gaps; they exploit them.
    
2. Illiberal governments can deliver, for a while. Orbán held power for sixteen years in part because EU money let him raise living standards. Warning that he was undemocratic did little. What finally hurt him was corruption that voters could see and feel.
    
3. Reversal requires decisive wins. Hungary is rebuilding quickly because Tisza won a supermajority. Poland is stuck because the illiberal camp still holds the presidency. A narrow victory may be enough to take office, but not to repair institutions, and repair has to happen by democratic means.
    
4. Society sets the floor. Díaz-Cayeros believes Brazil will not become El Salvador because of its federalism, its vibrant civil society, and its strong human rights tradition. These structures decide how far a democracy can fall. They can’t be built in a crisis, though, so the time to raise that floor is while democracy is still healthy.
    
5. Recovery is not permanent. Babiš, Fico, and possibly Flávio Bolsonaro show that defeated illiberal movements return when restored governments disappoint. Lula’s second term is a warning: democrats must keep delivering and renewing their leadership.
    
6. Democracy must be argued for, not assumed. The speakers pointed to strategies that work: making the costs of corruption concrete, framing checks and balances in patriotic terms as part of national identity, and taking on hard issues without abandoning liberal principles.

In summary, democracy came back when broad coalitions won convincingly on concrete grievances and then governed well enough to keep their majorities. Above all, as Grzymala-Busse put it, autocrats benefit from indifference and despair. Democracy's most important resource is citizens who keep demanding and participating.

Days before Serbia’s early parliamentary election, the Democracy Action Lab (DAL) at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) convened a panel on the conditions under which citizens of Serbia will vote. The webinar, “A Captured Field, an Open Contest: Serbia’s Upcoming Elections,” held on October 16 and co-sponsored by Stanford’s Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES), brought together Raša Nedeljkov, Dragana Žarković Obradović, and Gazela Pudar Draško. Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy, moderated the event.

Nedeljkov serves as program director of the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA) in Belgrade and has led its election observation mission since 2016. Žarković Obradović is the director of BIRN Serbia, part of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. Pudar Draško, a political sociologist, is a senior research fellow and director at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (IFDT) at the University of Belgrade.

Serbia will hold a parliamentary election on October 25 after nearly two years of sustained protest that began after the collapse of the canopy of the railway station in Novi Sad on November 1, 2024, which killed 16 people. The main opposition challenge comes from an electoral list formed by the student movement, which has gained broad support from most opposition parties and stands against Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). Approaching his two-term limit, Vučić stepped down as president in September to run for prime minister, and a presidential election is due by the end of the year.

Fukuyama opened the conversation by calling the Balkans “one of the important testing grounds for the resilience of democracy and its ability to fight back against a rising tide of authoritarian government,” and singling out Serbia as “the most important test case.” The election itself, in his view, is “more like a plebiscite… an up-or-down vote on Vučić and his leadership.”

An Uneven Playing Field

Nedeljkov said that CRTA’s findings on the conditions of the vote are clear. “These elections are far from democratic. They are not happening on an equal playing field. They are not happening in a free atmosphere,” he said.

“It’s quite clear that the election day is not the one that is the most problematic,” Nedeljkov said. Over a decade of observation, he has seen conditions worsen with each cycle: pressure on public-sector employees and private companies that do business with the state, abuse of public resources and office, media capture, and attacks on civic rights. “Each of these practices may look small on its own; however, together they are definitely creating a completely uneven playing field.”

He pointed to CRTA’s media monitoring, which found that Vučić personally accounted for every other second of prime-time political coverage on national television news, while 88% of coverage of the Student List was negative in tone. He also described the recent one-off payments to large swaths of the electorate, close to €1 billion against a 2026 budget of €25 billion, as “helicopter money,” and warned that the voter register goes into the election “completely unchecked and unverified.”
The most troubling feature of the campaign, Nedeljkov said, is impunity of public officials and supporters of the ruling party. “Those who abuse their power, they’re no longer fearing that they’re going to have any kind of consequence,” he said. “[The only ones] who can fear and should fear are those who speak up.”

On Sunday, October 4, 125 million Brazilians went to the polls to say what future they envision for their country. Their votes renewed state legislatures, the Chamber of Deputies, and two-thirds of the Federal Senate; elected governors in several states; and sent the presidential race to a runoff. Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, finished first, with 47% of the valid votes to President Lula's 45%, a result that defied polls showing the incumbent ahead. Another 33 million voters stayed home, the highest abstention rate since 1998.

The picture that emerges is one of deep dissatisfaction with the current state of democracy, and of a country turning to the far right. Given the new makeup of Congress — in which the far right and its closest allies will occupy over half of the seats in both chambers — the profound crisis surrounding the Supreme Federal Court, and the risk of an anti-democratic government rising to power, Brazil has never been so close to shattering the democratic pact enshrined in its 1988 Constitution.

To international observers, Brazilian voters' sense that their democracy is not doing well may seem counterintuitive. After all, over the past four years, many have pointed to Brazil as an example of democratic resilience — a reputation largely tied to holding accountable those who attempted a coup in January 2023 and to the country's return to its diplomatic tradition. But Brazilian democracy goes far beyond what happened in 2023, and we need to take a step back to grasp the size of the challenge ahead.

The Citizen Constitution

The 1988 Constitution established a legal framework characterized by broad guarantees of universal rights and an unprecedented opening for civil society participation in shaping the country's institutions. During the constituent process, around 10,000 people circulated through the National Congress each day, about 9 million visited Congress over the course of the proceedings, and 122 popular amendments were submitted, gathering more than 12 million signatures. But the Constitution did more than expand rights and channels for participation: it also laid the foundations for a balance among the three branches of government — the Executive, the Legislature, and the Judiciary — by distributing powers, establishing mechanisms of mutual oversight, and seeking to prevent the concentration of power.

The arrangement that emerged from this design became known as “coalition presidentialism,” a term coined by political scientist Sérgio Abranches. Under this model, the federal Executive plays a strong role in controlling the budget but depends on a multiparty coalition to carry out its agenda for the country. Since it is virtually impossible for a single party to win a majority on its own in either chamber, coalitions are needed to build majorities in Congress capable of passing the elected government's agenda. The Judiciary, for its part, historically acted to resolve constitutional questions that the other two branches had left unsettled.

The Scales Begin to Tip: Electoral Challenges and the Rise of Congress

This balance began to crack in earnest in 2014. For the first time since Brazil's return to democracy, the losing presidential candidate cast doubt on the integrity of the electoral system, which until then had been a source of national pride. This serious precedent left its mark on our democracy and paved the way for anti-democratic narratives that have since grown ever more sophisticated.

Shortly afterward, the historic rupture between then-Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies Eduardo Cunha and President Dilma Rousseff led to the opening of impeachment proceedings over alleged “crimes of responsibility,” Brazil's equivalent of impeachable offenses, tied to fiscal practices that, on closer inspection, had precedents in previous administrations without ever having triggered a process of this kind. In this sense, Rousseff's impeachment differs from the one faced by former President Fernando Collor de Mello in 1992, which uncovered a corruption scheme that paid for the president's personal expenses.

In other words, the practice itself was not the reason for the process; it was the political discontent of part of the governing coalition that decided, for the first time, to punish a fiscal practice until then widely accepted across the political class. The revolt of part of Rousseff's base in Congress did not merely remove her from office: it opened an era of open confrontation between the Legislature and the Executive, with the acquiescence, at the time, of the Judiciary, in what came to be described as a “grand national agreement.”

That period left another important legacy of imbalance between the branches. In 2015, Congress passed a constitutional amendment requiring the Executive to fund individual budget amendments. Budget amendments are instruments that allow deputies and senators to change the annual budget law, directing public funds to public works, projects, and improvements in the states and municipalities they represent, much like what Americans know as earmarks. They are classified by who proposes them. Individual amendments come from each legislator. State delegation amendments come from the lawmakers of each state acting together. Committee amendments come from the standing committees of Congress. Rapporteur amendments come from the general rapporteur, the legislator in charge of the budget bill. The 2015 requirement, known as the “mandatory budget,” applied only to individual amendments, capped at 1.2% of the federal government's net current revenue.

With Jair Bolsonaro's rise to power, this imbalance took on a new dimension. In 2019, two new constitutional amendments deepened the trend. The first made funding for amendments from state congressional delegations mandatory as well. The second split individual amendments in two. Amendments with a defined purpose remained tied to a specific project, such as a health clinic or a paved road. The new “special transfers,” nicknamed “Pix amendments” after Brazil's instant payment system, allow money to flow from Congress directly to states and municipalities without clear transparency mechanisms.

Rapporteur amendments changed even more. Until then, the general rapporteur had used them mostly for technical adjustments to the bill, often to restore funding for the Executive's own programs. In 2020, they received their own budget code, RP9, and became the core of the so-called “secret budget”: billions of reais distributed at the request of lawmakers whose names were not disclosed. After the Supreme Court struck down the practice in December 2022, Congress raised the cap on individual amendments to 2% of net current revenue. It also turned to committee amendments, which, until then, had carried little weight, as the new channel for these funds.
 

Image

^{Budget amendments committed by type, 2014—2026. Source: Central das Emendas, adapted. Painel de Dados accessed on October 7, 2026; it draws on Portal da Transparência (CGU) amendment and expenditure-document data.}

The Executive's consent, then under Bolsonaro's leadership, to this surrender of control over the federal budget gave Congress a power never foreseen in the balance designed in 1988 and transformed the country's political dynamics. Congressional blocs lost interest in joining the governing coalition and began to prioritize influence within Congress itself, where they could access large sums of money without transparency or Executive mediation.

Greater control over the budget, however, does not fully account for the Legislature's growing power: a recent report by the Fernando Henrique Cardoso Foundation shows that Congress has been gaining ground on the Executive for two decades, helped by a 2001 reform that limited the president's power to rule by decree, stronger in-house technical staff, and informal practices that concentrated power in the Speaker's hands.

Together, these developments entrenched a new balance of forces among the branches of government. By the time Lula da Silva returned to power in 2023, the Executive was far more dependent on the Legislature to manage the federal budget and advance its agenda.

The Judiciary: From Bulwark of Democracy to Target of Distrust

During Jair Bolsonaro's administration, the Judiciary played a central role in containing setbacks, as the Executive and Legislative branches advanced agendas flagrantly at odds with the 1988 Constitution. This expanded role is consistent with the concept of militant democracy coined by Karl Loewenstein in 1937, in which an institutional mechanism of the State is activated to defend the democratic order against actors who use their democratic freedoms to destroy the system itself.

This activation, however, took place without the involvement of the Office of the Prosecutor General of the Republic (Procuradoria-Geral da República, PGR), the body legally empowered to bring criminal proceedings against authorities entitled to special jurisdiction (foro privilegiado), including the President of the Republic. For most of Bolsonaro's term, the Prosecutor General was Augusto Aras, a prosecutor hand-picked by the President whose tenure was marked by inaction in the face of measures taken by the Federal Government and the Legislature. It fell to civil society and other key sectors of the country to use strategic litigation to activate this cordon sanitaire, spearheaded by the Federal Supreme Court (STF). As a result, the serious erosion of economic, social, cultural, environmental, and political rights slowed during that period.

In response to the Judiciary's more forceful actions, the Bolsonaro government and its base launched serious attacks against the Supreme Court and its justices, opening a new phase in which one political camp openly questions the integrity of the Judiciary and has even gone as far as persecuting specific justices. In 2021 alone, Bolsonaro called Justice Luís Roberto Barroso, then head of the Superior Electoral Court, "an imbecile" for opposing printed ballots, and asked the Senate to impeach Justice Alexandre de Moraes.

Tensions between the former president's political camp and the Judiciary reached new heights in the 2022 elections and the subsequent coup attempt, which culminated in the storming of the buildings that house the three branches of government, a Brazilian echo of January 6. The decisive actions of the Superior Electoral Court and the Supreme Federal Court were central to preventing a breakdown of the institutional order, ensuring both the security of an election directly affected by the sitting government and the legal accountability of those involved in the coup attempt.

What had been the main barrier against the crises up to that point came to face public distrust and became the target of a new weapon of the far right: the threat of impeachment of Supreme Court justices by the Senate, which holds this constitutional prerogative, provided that a conviction is approved by two-thirds of its members.

If the far right's accusations against the Supreme Court found no basis in fact when it came to defending the elections and holding accountable those who committed crimes against democracy, a massive corruption scandal would complicate that picture. In 2025, Brazilians learned of the case of Banco Master, a financial institution used to sell unbacked bank securities and associated with the diversion of billions in public funds from various sources, as well as with suspicious ties to people across all branches of government, including Supreme Court justices. One of the names mentioned in the investigation is that of Alexandre de Moraes, the very justice who presided over the Superior Electoral Court in the 2022 elections and led the cases on crimes against the rule of law after the coup attempt. Although he is commonly associated with President Lula, Moraes was appointed years earlier by then-President Michel Temer. Reporting on the investigation has also named five other justices or their relatives: Dias Toffoli, who stepped down as rapporteur of the Banco Master case in February; André Mendonça; Gilmar Mendes; Kassio Nunes Marques; and Luiz Fux. All deny wrongdoing.

This leaves Brazilians with a dilemma: how could the Judiciary's correct actions to protect democracy in 2022 and 2023 have been carried out by the same Court whose members now face scrutiny over alleged ties with private actors responsible for diverting billions of reais from taxpayers?

2026: The Perfect Storm and the Voters' Response

Brazil entered 2026 amid a perfect storm: a Legislature with sweeping powers over the federal budget, a weakened Executive, a Judiciary exposed in its contradictions, and a population exhausted by a war of narratives fueled by disinformation and the intensive use of technology to amplify it. This scenario is further exacerbated by the immense power concentrated in Big Tech companies, whose practices remain marked by a lack of transparency regarding content moderation criteria and the algorithmic choices that shape public debate. Amid this environment of fragmentation, echo chambers, distrust, and constant conflict, there is increasingly little room to discuss visions for the country's future, build minimum consensus, or collectively imagine ways out of the crisis.

A concrete example of the breakdown in the balance between the branches was the Senate's rejection of the President's nominee to the Supreme Federal Court in April of this year, something that had not happened since 1894. Brazil is showing clear signs that the 1988 pact is unraveling, and the winners of the 2026 elections will determine what comes next.

With the October 4 results, voters consolidated the far right as the largest force in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. Threats to impeach Supreme Court justices are becoming more concrete, and the next president will have the power to appoint four justices to the Court: the seat left by Luís Roberto Barroso's retirement, still unfilled, and three more that will open as justices reach the mandatory retirement age of 75.

At a time when Supreme Court justices have increasingly been chosen for their political affinity with the president, a potential Flávio Bolsonaro administration, combined with a large extremist base in the Senate, could consolidate a solid conservative majority on the country's highest court.

October 25 and the Day After

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro will face each other in the runoff on October 25. If the far-right candidate prevails, the balance between the branches designed in 1988 is unlikely to survive, as threats to change the constitutional text begin to take public form. If Lula's democratic project wins, the fractures in our democracy will still run so deep that there is no guarantee this order will endure either.

The choice on the 25th is not a difficult one. The hard part begins on the 26th: finding a path that keeps one of the world's most pioneering democratic experiments from collapsing.

This path begins by taking seriously the discontent that the first round laid bare. Some of Brazilians' distrust of their institutions has been deliberately manufactured, as demonstrated by a decade-long campaign of attacks on the electoral system. But some of it is also rooted in the country's concrete realities. We are a profoundly unequal society, shaped by social relations forged through nearly four centuries of slavery and, consequently, by persistent structures of authoritarianism, violence, and concentrations of power rooted in class, race, gender, and hetero-cisnormativity. Added to this are institutions that still lack transparency, a Congress that has come to control a growing share of the federal budget through mechanisms frequently questioned for their opacity, and successive corruption cases involving different branches and levels of the state — institutional weaknesses that recent scandals, such as the Banco Master case, have once again brought to the center of public debate.

The far right did not create this frustration, but it skillfully tapped into the resentments that underpin our social relations and our relationship with institutions, learning how to channel them and turn them into political force. And the 33 million Brazilians who did not go to the polls on October 4, along with the nearly 6 million blank and invalid ballots — a figure that is higher than the population of many US states — remind us that disillusionment can also take the form of silence or a protest vote.

Our institutions are not immune to criticism, and defending democracy cannot mean defending them as they are, with all their shortcomings, failures, and contradictions. No government, and no one who leads it, can find that path alone. Rebuilding the balance struck in 1988 will depend on institutions capable of earning back the trust they have lost, and on a society willing to continue contesting how these institutions and public policies are shaped, as well as defending the rules of the game, even when they do not favor its side.

Natália Neris is the Advocacy Manager at Pacto pela Democracia, and holds a PhD in Human Rights from the University of São Paulo. Sami Sternberg is the International Affairs Coordinator at Pacto pela Democracia, and holds a master's degree in international affairs from Columbia University.

On May 15, the Stanford Society for Latin American Politics (SSLAP) and the Democracy Action Lab (DAL) at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) co-hosted Professor Alberto Vergara for a discussion on “Democratic Hollowing in Peru: The Underexplored Pathway of Democratic Erosion” as part of the DAL series Democracy at the Ballot Box: The 2026 Electoral Cycle in Latin America. The talk offered key reflections on Peru's political trajectory over the past decade and the emerging threats to its democracy.

Less than 24 hours after Colombians cast their first-round ballots in the presidential election, CDDRL’s Democracy Action Lab (DAL) convened four scholars for a webinar launching its new series, “Democracy at the Ballot Box: The 2026 Electoral Cycle in Latin America.” Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, DAL's co-director, moderated a conversation with Michael Weintraub (Universidad de los Andes, director of CESED, the Center for the Study of Security and Drugs), Javier Mejía Cubillos (Stanford University, Department of Political Science and the Stanford Civics Initiative), Oliver Kaplan (University of Denver's Korbel School, 2025-26 Visiting Scholar at CDDRL), and María Ignacia Curiel (Stanford University, research scholar at CDDRL and research manager of DAL).

The election results were jarring. Abelardo de la Espriella, an independent lawyer running hard on security, had taken 43.75 percent of the vote to Iván Cepeda's 40.90 percent — with Uribista Paloma Valencia a distant third at roughly 7 percent, and centrists Sergio Fajardo and Claudia López splitting another 5 percent between them. A runoff was set for June 21. The panel had one day to make sense of it.

This fall, Stanford Continuing Studies will present its third annual Reimagining Democracy course, a six-part speaker series produced with the Office of Community Engagement, the Stanford Democracy Hub, and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). The free public series runs weekly starting October 7 and is hosted by Debra Satz, Vernon R. and Lysbeth Warren Anderson Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, and CDDRL's Larry Diamond, Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI).

The series features Stanford scholars who help us understand democracy: how America’s founding 250 years ago shapes public life today, and where we go from here in reimagining and strengthening democratic values and governance, at home and around the world. This year’s series features constitutional, electoral, social science, and humanities experts with conversations connecting to the US November midterm elections and beyond.

The series draws heavily on CDDRL's bench of democracy scholars. Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, Senior Fellow at FSI and Co-Director of CDDRL's Democracy Action Lab, joins Anna Grzymala-Busse, Senior Fellow at FSI, for the October 14 conversation on global democracy and elections, drawing on their comparative work on democratic decline and resilience. Didi Kuo, Center Fellow at FSI and program manager of CDDRL's Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective, joins the October 21 session on money in politics, bringing her research on political parties and institutional reform. Nate Persily, James B. McClatchy Professor of Law and Senior Fellow at FSI, brings his expertise in election law to the October 28 session on voting rights and electoral reform. Other sessions bring in Stanford colleagues working across law, history, and public service.

All sessions will be recorded, and videos will be available afterward for those unable to attend live.