Since the 2008 crisis, the world’s democracies have been damaged at their core: citizens’ trust in the system’s ability to provide well-being and justice. The movements promising new politics seemed capable of repairing this fracture a decade ago, but they failed. In parallel, a movement has emerged that rides on this wave of distrust and appears poised to define a new era.
The year 2026 marks the 10th anniversary of two of the foundational milestones of the reactionary wave that has gripped the world. Or, in other words, it marks a decade of the historical period in which we find ourselves, one of a strident, distressing, cruel, and, to a certain extent, primitive reality. These foundational milestones, now 10 years old, are Donald Trump’s first election as president of the United States, and the Brexit referendum and corresponding Cambridge Analytica case, the first known “scandal” (as it was still considered at the time) of massive election manipulation using social media.
Ten years later, those episodes — which at the time might have seemed like accidents, momentary lapses, or easily resolved outbursts (in fact, that’s what it seemed like in the United States in 2020 when Joe Biden won the election) — reveal themselves as the gateway to a new era. It’s an era that’s still confusing, but its contours are becoming clearer as the years go by. It’s a world where compassion has disappeared, replaced by cruelty as an expression of the absolute self — a self unleashed in pursuit of its interests, without the constraints and limits imposed by the established order, with its rules and laws. Everything that had been painstakingly built, with great effort, to ensure a respectable and worthy human coexistence has been vanishing into thin air in this headlong assault by a power that feels (and knows itself) to be untouchable.
The speeches predicting that the system of checks and balances, enshrined in both the Constitution and customs, would act as a bulwark against Trump’s intentions to create an imperial presidency could still be heard when Trump assumed the U.S. presidency for the second time. Today, the United States is already being discussed as a pseudo-petromonarchy in which the boundary between the interests of the state and those of the president’s family is blurred, with most powers surrendered to the desires of an emperor with psychotic traits and an insatiable appetite. An emperor and his court of billionaires are engaged in a crusade of visionaries who, like those of a thousand years ago, seek to become extraordinarily rich while creating a new world and exterminating “infidels.”
In the United States, the elite’s takeover of the levers of power has been unstoppable. From Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (today called X) in 2022 and Jeff Bezos’s acquisition of The Washington Post in 2024, to Paramount’s announced purchase of Warner Bros. at the expense of Netflix, which will create a behemoth at the service of Trump’s policies and those of his successor. Step by step and piece by piece, virtually all the spaces that could have facilitated a balance of power between the executive and the other branches have fallen to the emperor’s side, leaving less and less room for alternatives, dissenting voices, or different explanations of what is happening.
It is telling of our time that, were Watergate to happen today, it would have nowhere to be revealed — or at the very least, it could not be exposed in a major newspaper (perhaps only in The New York Times, now the sole major outlet that has not fallen under the orbit of some imperial courtier), leaving its impact to a handful of resistant websites or to journalists with more determination than resources.
The occupation of power structures by those loyal to Trump has been relentless and, with it, the suffocation of dissenting voices — of democracy itself. And this has been possible right under our noses, through a process of undermining the system’s foundations in which citizens and the blindness of democrats (in the broad sense) have been its unwitting collaborators.
A recent report from the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg places the United States at its lowest level of democracy in 60 years. And it’s not just the United States. The same report speaks of a “third wave” of autocratization, affecting a substantial part of the world. The process of accumulating power and silencing dissent is a sadly widespread trend.
The unfinished crisis of 2008
It is impossible to understand the triumph of the reactionary wave without pointing to the weakening of institutions and of the entire political system that began with the 2008 crisis and has not been properly addressed or reversed. Our democratic system is a fragile construction grounded in something intangible: citizens’ trust, which in turn rests on a relationship of reciprocity between the public and democratic powers. People grant trust insofar as it is returned to them in the form of well‑being.
Democracy is not a system carved in stone like religions; it is not a temple, but rather a breeze — a continuous flow — and that flow came to a halt at some point between 2008 and 2012, stopping the mechanism. Quite simply, the system stopped responding and, as a consequence, citizens stopped trusting it. Overcoming the macro-level aspects of the global financial crisis (the bank bailout) masked the persistence of this underlying paralysis in the functional mechanism of democracy. Few noticed it, few warned about it, despite the many signs.
In Spain, 2026 also marks the 10th anniversary of the entry of new political parties into Congress. The 11th legislature opened in January 2016 following the December 2015 elections. The image of that day was defined by the presence of the infant son of Carolina Bescansa, a leader of Podemos and one of the 69 new representatives of the leftist party making their debut in the lower house. Together with the center-right Ciudadanos, which was also entering parliament as a state‑level force, the new parties held 109 seats, backed by one-third of voters — 8.6 million people. The Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) had lost 20 seats; the conservative Popular Party (PP), 63. Between them, they barely managed to hold on to 50% of the vote.
That was also 10 years ago. Voting for the new parties was a step forward for a generation — those born in democracy after the Franco dictatorship — who were claiming their role as active citizens, as a central group in defining the future of a country whose consensual design from the transition, the great achievement of the postwar generation, had remained unchanged until then. The echoes of the 2008 crisis, the anti-austerity movement known as 15-M (also referred to as the movement of the indignados or the outraged), of the under-40 population reached the Spanish Congress. It was a jolt similar to that of the first democratic election in 1977 after the death of Franco. New faces, new styles.
Ten years later, it is easy to see in that moment an attempt to reactivate the system’s underlying mechanism — the steady flow of well‑being and trust, the democratic pump that keeps the system alive. The emergence of new political parties in Spain was part of a similar wave of new parties challenging the old establishment, as in Greece and other European countries.
Postponing democratic renewal
In Spain, the experiment failed to take hold. Despite the successes of 2015 at the municipal, regional, and general elections, the repeat elections the following June and Pedro Sánchez’s ouster in October created a stalemate that ultimately swallowed up any possibility of achieving political renewal, diluting the initial euphoria and momentum. The political climate soured, times became tougher, positions more inflexible, and agreements impossible. The hypothetical consensus to breathe new life into the system crumbled, bringing the process to a standstill once again.
Spain has spent a decade postponing a reform of the system sine die, which is to say that the hope of 10 years ago has gradually withered, leaving behind a residue of discontent and resignation toward a politics that no longer seems capable of offering a horizon of hope. The drift of these 10 years is evident in the data collected by Spain’s statistical bureau CIS in its February barometer. For 43% of respondents, their assessment of the Spanish Constitution has worsened over the last decade, and 58% say they have little or no confidence that the Constitution can resolve the current problems of Spanish society. Among those aged 25 to 34, nearly 70% share this view.
It is consistent with all this that more than 80% of those interviewed by the CIS advocate for a constitutional reform — 15 points more than in 2018 — and that two‑thirds of them prefer a “major” reform. This, however, coexists with the sense that such a reform is, for now, impossible to carry out. The context has changed greatly since 2016, and not for the better. If the vote in 2015 expressed confidence that the system could be changed, today’s vote expresses fear that it might change in the direction set by reactionary forces. Hope has given way to fear; trust, to fury.
The advance of the forces of the new authoritarianism over this decade has imposed a shift in the terms of the democratic pact. The exchange between well‑being and trust is being replaced by a barter between security and vassalage. The legal framework is now subordinated to the will of the monarch, the powerful figure who feels literally above any law. The advance of this new order is possible because it enjoys the approval of large majorities of citizens. Reactionary forces have been gaining ground legitimately through democratic mechanisms, lifted by a segment of the public that saw in them the solution to a system that offered no answers, that seemed incapable.
The 2008 collapse — which went unrecognized — has resurfaced in the form of fear, uncertainty, and a sense of abandonment, and in those conditions, intensified by the digital universe, the new authoritarianism of providential men has thrived, offering security to their own in the face of a world of threats, whether real, imagined, or manufactured by the algorithm.
Democratic reaction
A decade after that inaugural 2016, the contours of the monster are now clearly visible, as is the fragility of our weary democracies, subjected to an unrelenting authoritarian onslaught. Over these 10 years, democrats have moved through all the stages of grief. First came the denial of the reactionary wave, caricaturing it, reducing it to a fleeting episode starring a clumsy clown overwhelmed by the exercise of power, from which he would be unseated without leaving a trace.
We were blind to the rot eating away at our democracies, with their paralyzed mechanisms and the growing public indignation toward a politics that felt spent and hollow. Then came the dread at the unexpected magnitude of the pendulum swing, the disbelief at the collapse of our world, and the tide of rising authoritarianism.
The present moment can — and perhaps must — be a vanishing point, a break, the beginning of something like an awakening. It may be time to move beyond mere resistance, time to abandon the trench‑warfare morality and to set in motion a democratic reaction.
A democratic reaction cannot be based on the uncritical defense of our political system as it was left by the brutal impact of the 2008 crisis and the decisions made to overcome it. The arena where the future of our democracies is being decided (and is being decided right now) is not the debate with reactionary forces, but rather the ability of democratic forces to convince the majority that it is possible to offer them a better present and future.
The mistake thus far has been to minimize, if not outright dismiss, the fear and unease felt by part of the population, while simultaneously denying the possibility of an alternative better than the democracy we currently have. Through this crack, authoritarianism has seeped into the very core of society. Faced with this, the democratic response cannot be the uncritical acceptance of the world proposed by reactionaries (à la Ursula Von der Leyen).
Democratic forces must dare to propose a new agreement with the people, one that inevitably involves restoring their faith in democracy, restoring their confidence that the system can guarantee well-being and justice for the vast majority. Only this can stop the reactionary wave unleashed 10 years ago. We democrats must react. To leave the trenches and, to paraphrase Trump himself: fight, fight, fight.
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