According to Freedom House (2026), 2025 marked the 20th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. At the same time, democracies around the world have been facing a high number of challenges coming from both within and from the outside: wars, the rise of extremist and populist parties, and climate change have all tested the democratic foundations of Western countries and like-minded nations. Trust in democracy is falling, and authoritarian regimes are more connected and organised in challenging the post-’90s ‘liberal international order, making it hard to build international consensus around the value of democracy. In this regard, an increasing interest in developing strategies to consolidate and strengthen democracy in these challenging times has emerged: this is what democratic resilience is about.
But how can we define this concept? According to the European Democracy Hub (2024), democratic resilience can be described as “the ability of a political system to withstand and adapt to challenges, threats and crises without compromising its core principles, institutions, or processes”. Therefore, this definition highlights that democratic resilience not only involves the ability of a democratic regime to maintain the integrity of its governance, but also the capacity to adapt and evolve its structure to make it more robust and able to respond to future challenges.
Practically speaking, Merkel (2026) identifies three forms or modes of resilience when a democratic regime is under pressure: resistance, adaptation and recovery. Concerning the first one, it refers to the mobilisation of democratic institutions and “the minds of their citizens”. Examples include an independent judiciary, which can restrain the executive’s attempts to enlarge its power and ban anti-democratic networks, and democratic parties, which can organise to exclude extremist parties from being part of ruling coalitions (as happened in Italy during the Cold War or as it happens today in Germany with the so-called brandmauer). Adaptation, on the other hand, applies when normal democratic mechanisms and procedures evolve to face the new contexts and challenges democracy faces, as happened during the Covid-19 pandemic: strong measures limiting individual and civil liberties were decided, and ordinary parliamentary proceedings were suspended in order to stop the spread of the virus. However, once the health emergency was addressed, all fundamental rights were restored, and democracy returned to its original status. Finally, the last form of democratic resilience is recovery. This refers to the capacity to restore democratic principles (political pluralism, rule of law, …) and institutions after a crisis has come to an end. However, re-democratisation is different from democratisation, and sometimes even more difficult since it aims at regaining control of existing institutions previously captured or subverted by authoritarian, illiberal leaders or parties. At this point, indeed, reformers face two choices: following existing legal paths and proceedings (but approved by the previous government) or circumventing them, risking being accused of governing in an authoritarian way. The first case includes Poland after 2023, where the new government led by PM Donald Tusk faced increasing difficulties in re-establishing democracy after the eight-year PiS administration, because during this period the right-wing party was able to put loyal officials in key administrative and political positions. A different, more ambiguous case is the Hungarian Magyar government, inaugurated in 2026. It pushed Parliament to approve some controversial measures in order to put an end to Viktor Orban’s era: such steps included changes to the constitution, such as fixing at 70 the maximum age to serve on the Constitutional Court and the possibility of removing the acting President of the Republic, accused of being aligned with the previous executive. We can consider this as a limit case, since it resorts to legal measures but with ambiguous proceedings.
In conclusion, reinforcing democratic resilience can be considered a key element in safeguarding democracy: the more democratic institutions and civil society are strengthened, the more backsliding and breakdown will be prevented.
This article is edited by Mattia Turello to present the theory applied in “D5.3 Proof of Concept Democratic Resilience”