Democracy: Not Dead Yet

Too often have political commentators, pundits, activists, pollsters, public opinion experts, even scholars, accepted the idea, the assessment, the prediction that ‘democracy is in crisis’, that democracy is eroded and that a major, perhaps irreversible, process of democratic backsliding is at work. A recent book titled How Democracies Die. What History Reveals About Our Future (by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, 2018) has become a bestseller. No matter if, in spite of several challenges, very few democracies have in fact died in the past thirty years. Technically, of course, democracies do not die, they are ‘murdered’ by the elites, political, military, economic, religious. On the contrary, in not a few countries there is an undergoing struggle that may lead to the inauguration of a democratic political system.