Anyone who has lived through a democracy’s collapse knows the score: Authoritarians often come to power off a wave of public anger. Their early popularity can delay resistance, making it feel risky or even anti-democratic — but that’s precisely when the real damage gets done.
The longer a resistance movement hesitates, the harder democracy falls.
We know from decades of research on democratic backsliding that timing and scale matter. Meaning, there’s a brief window for action before a would-be authoritarian consolidates power, and that window closes faster than most realize. Also, mass mobilization alone isn’t enough to counteract the momentum; it must be coupled with real institutional pushback.
In Hungary, for example, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party steadily hollowed out the country’s democratic institutions, capturing courts, media and universities, while their opponents hesitated. Hungarian opposition leaders now admit they moved too slowly. Many feared resisting too early on might appear anti-democratic, so they waited. They didn’t know just how fast the system would erode.
In Turkey, meanwhile, we saw how mass protests can signal resistance, but don’t always stop the slide toward authoritarianism — at least, not in isolation. Even enormous demonstrations, like the 2013 Gezi Park protests, didn’t prevent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s consolidation of power. And once authoritarian movements capture institutions, the game changes. Resistance becomes harder, and far more dangerous.
Years later, Turkey now stands at the brink of what democracy scholars call the authoritarian endgame: The arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, Erdoğan’s most formidable rival, signals a new benchmark in the country’s continued backslide.