FREEDOM IN THE WORLD 2023 Marking 50 Years in the Struggle for Democracy A woman holds an infant inside a school in Mekelle, within the Tigray region of Ethiopia. The school was turned into a temporary shelter for people displaced by conflict in the region. (Image credit: Reuters/Baz Ratner) little regard for their due process rights. Under the state of exception, authorities have also suspended anticorruption mechanisms that would shed light on government spending and contracts. In September, Bukele announced that he would compete for a second term, a year after the Constitutional Court—newly packed with his appointees after a wholesale purge—overturned a ban on consecutive presidential terms. The victory of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary’s April 2022 elections was facilitated by his government’s campaign since 2010 to systematically undermine the independence of the judiciary, opposition groups, the media, and nongovernmental organizations. Among other advantages, Fidesz benefited from legislative changes it had pushed through two years earlier, which raised the vote threshold that parties must reach to enter the parliament. Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s warnings that he would not accept election results if he lost stoked mistrust in the democratic process among his supporters. After losing to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in a runoff, Bolsonaro avoided formally conceding, and his campaign later attempted to overturn the result in court by claiming that a computer error had disqualified large batches of votes. Just before Lula’s January 1 inauguration, Bolsonaro traveled to the United States, avoiding participation in the traditional transfer of the presidential sash to the new leader. The next week, thousands of the former president’s loyalists, who had repeatedly called 6 @ FreedomHouse for a military coup against the new government, stormed Congress, the Supreme Court, and the presidential palace. Although the elected administration retained power and cracked down on the perpetrators, Brazilian democracy remained on the defensive after this destructive event. The worst excesses of unchecked power When assessing the stakes of the struggle for democracy, it is important to remember the devastating costs that authoritarian rule can impose on entire populations. In the absence of any meaningful constraints on political power and the use of force, a growing number of regimes around the world have engaged in wholesale persecution of women or ethnic minority groups, in some cases drawing accusations of genocide. Since overthrowing Afghanistan’s elected government in 2021, the Taliban have presided over a catastrophic economic collapse, a surge in hunger and poverty, and mass emigration. Rather than taking steps that would reduce its international isolation, however, the regime has moved in the opposite direction. The Taliban authorities barred girls from attending secondary school in March 2022, effectively ending education for women after the sixth grade, and in December they ordered private and public universities to prohibit female students from attending classes, preventing women who already reached higher education from completing their #FreedomInTheWorld