The rule of law is in danger worldwide and democracy in the United States is at its lowest level in the last 50 years. These are some of the conclusions of the annual report published this Tuesday by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), an intergovernmental organization based in Stockholm. The publication coincides with International Democracy Day, which the UN established on September 15 to promote its values.
Washington’s distancing from the international order “has weakened confidence in multilateralism and emboldened authoritarian and populist leaders,” the report states, titled “The Global State of Democracy 2026: Democracy in an Era of Conflict,” which assesses the situation in 173 countries and is based on 30 indicators that International IDEA uses for its annual reports, taking 1975 as the reference year.
“The main indicators of American democracy, from press freedom to judicial independence, have reached their lowest level in 50 years,” the report adds.
“The rapid decline of democracy in the United States is weakening judicial independence and fragmenting the international system, threatening democracies worldwide,” said International IDEA Secretary-General Kevin Casas-Zamora in a statement.
“The patient zero of this global epidemic is the current president of the United States,” Donald Trump, Casas-Zamora pointed out in statements to the AFP agency. “I believe what happened in the United States in 2020 had a real global impact by helping to legitimize this type of attack against the credibility of the electoral process,” he added, referring to Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his defeat to Joe Biden after the 2020 U.S. presidential elections.
“In some respects, such as runaway polarization, the deterioration of American democracy predates Trump. However, what we have seen in the last two years has been a devastating acceleration,” emphasized the Secretary-General of the intergovernmental organization in statements to the newspaper El País. “The attack on the norms of the rule of law has been very aggressive, with a great strengthening of the Executive’s powers and prerogatives at the expense of all checks and balances. And what happens in the U.S. has global implications,” he warned.
Trump’s Washington has become, in short, “the most prominent example and the main accelerator of a disturbing global trend of erosion and weakening of the rule of law,” Casas-Zamora maintains.
“Its model is being replicated by other leaders and countries, and it correlates with the widespread offensive against international law: it is all part of the same process,” elaborates the political scientist and former second vice president of Costa Rica, who frames this dynamic in something much broader: a “new populist right that attacks norms because they see them as a wall against the popular will they claim to embody. And that seeks to emasculate all controls over political power: this has been seen with (Viktor) Orbán and is seen with Trump or (Nayib) Bukele, among many other cases.”
Approximately 57% of the countries analyzed recorded between 2020 and 2025 a decrease in at least one indicator measuring democratic health: judicial independence, credible elections, freedom of the press and expression, and access to justice.
For example, 41% of countries have a “low performance” in the rule of law category, which includes judicial independence. The credibility of elections deteriorated in 18% of countries, while parliamentary effectiveness worsened in 19%.
Regarding respect for human rights, freedom of expression has declined in 24% of the countries evaluated (especially affecting press freedom), and access to justice has fallen in 18%, which, according to IDEA, shows the growing attack on fundamental rights worldwide.
In conclusion, IDEA highlights that 2025 was the 11th consecutive year in which the most countries showed a net decline in their democratic health, the longest consecutive drop since 1975.
International IDEA had already included the United States in 2021 on its list of democracies in decline. At that time, the organization noted a visible deterioration that, according to its records, had begun in 2019.
In March, the V-Dem Institute, also Swedish, removed the United States from the category of full liberal democracy, placing the country at the level of Hungary or Turkey, all due to Donald Trump’s authoritarian drift in his second term.
In the case of the United States, IDEA considers that there has been a “concentration of executive power” under Trump’s presidency, which weakens institutional checks and balances.
“President Trump quickly amassed power in the executive branch and used it to push a narrow set of personal goals and to retaliate against those perceived as enemies,” IDEA emphasizes. “In that environment, marked by limited space both for public expression and for checks on power, resistance is increasingly insecure,” it adds.
Casas-Zamora also warned about the international impact of U.S. political events. “What happens in the United States globalizes,” he said, before referring to what he called an expansion of electoral denialism.
However, the Secretary-General of International IDEA avoided considering democratic deterioration irreversible. “I am not willing to say that the decline in the quality of democracy is inevitable or permanent. It can be reversed,” he stated.
