Voters are turning out in droves to cut autocrats down to size

It’s not just the U.S. midterms: An anti-authoritarian wave appears to be crashing over elections around the world.

In country after country that has struggled with creeping authoritarianism and democratic decay, outraged electorates have turned out in record numbers, delivering indisputable victories that have checked the autocratic advance.

The United States crossed into “competitive authoritarianism” during President Donald Trump’s second term, according to eminent political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way. Voters issued a stunning rebuke in the midterms, when an expected blue wave turned out to be a blue tsunami.

The outpouring was just what Kamala Harris, the former Democratic presidential contender, urged before the vote when she told supporters, “We just need to turn out in really large numbers that would be too big to rig.” It even overcame exceptional efforts by Trump and his party to gerrymander impenetrable Republican districts.

Voters are still seen as more likely to go to the polls to defend their pocketbooks than democratic principles. But when those issues intersect — for instance, in angry accusations of corruption, at a time when voters are struggling economically — the combination has proved especially motivating.

The year has provided a host of examples, as voters turned out in numbers that capsized the efforts of nationalist autocrats, tainted by corruption accusations, to tilt the political playing field their way even before elections could begin.

Last month, when Aleksandar Vucic, Serbia’s longtime nationalist strongman, was swept out of power, estimates suggested that voter turnout was nearly 70%, the highest since the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.

In Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated Flávio Bolsonaro, whose father, the former president Jair Bolsonaro, was jailed for attempting a coup after he lost the last election to Lula. In this year’s election, turnout increased by nearly 3 million voters between the first and second rounds, bucking the usual trend of votes falling in the runoff. Voter absenteeism fell to the lowest level of any Brazilian presidential election.

In Hungary, Viktor Orban, a MAGA favorite who had proclaimed himself the champion of “illiberal democracy,” was ousted in April after nearly 16 successive years as prime minister. Voter turnout reached its highest level since the fall of Communism in 1989 — about 80%.

The overwhelming turnout and high margins of those victories were important, because they neutralized the tactics that authoritarian leaders often use to prejudice electoral outcomes in their favor, said Kim L. Scheppele, a professor at Princeton University who studies democracy in Eastern Europe.

“If you have a close vote, then autocratic capture can always pull them over the line with dirty tricks of different kinds,” she said. But when the margin is huge, such tricks no longer work, and disfavored leaders must either step down or fully abandon democracy in favor of a violent crackdown, as former President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela did when he faced a loss in 2024.

In Hungary, for example, the opposition Tisza party won an absolute majority in Parliament, overcoming even the rejigged rules that Orban had long used to ensure that a plurality of votes gave his party a supermajority in the legislature.

In Israel, by contrast, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition lost its parliamentary majority in elections in October, due in part to record-high turnout among Israeli Arabs. But the coalition bargaining is so narrow that Netanyahu has tried to cast doubt on the results by claiming without evidence that the Arab parties stole the election.

Young people have been a crucial element of this new anti-authoritarian wave.

“I want to thank the generosity of Brazilian youth, who took to the streets to defend democracy,” Lula said in his victory speech, referring to student protests that broke out after he finished in second place in the first round of the presidential election. In the second round, Lula’s substantial advantage with voters younger than 35 powered him to victory.

In the United States, 70% of all voters younger than 30 cast their ballots for Democrats, according to New York Times data. Even more notably, 61% of young men voted Democrat — a big change from 2024, when more than 56% of them supported Trump.

In Hungary, according to exit polls, 67% of voters younger than 30 cast their ballots for the victorious Tisza party, compared with just 8% for Orban’s party, Fidesz.

The most notable youth effects came in Serbia, where the opposition’s victory was driven by a new youth-led political bloc called Student List-Students Win, which grew out of a longtime student protest movement. The students recruited candidates from outside the political system: doctors, scientists and others. Their message — anti-politics but pro-democracy — resonated with voters.

“If you can get all new faces, then you can build these big-tent parties and let young people power it with social media,” Scheppele said. “Then you can get these huge election victories, which enable you to really root out the prior autocratic government.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.