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1 Fateful Alliances

A quarrel had arisen between the Horse and the Stag, so the Horse came to a Hunter to ask his help to take revenge on the Stag. The Hunter agreed but said: “If you desire to conquer the Stag, you must permit me to place this piece of iron between your jaws, so that I may guide you with these reins, and allow this saddle to be placed upon your back so that I may keep steady upon you as we follow the enemy.” The Horse agreed to the conditions, and the Hunter soon saddled and bridled him. Then, with the aid of the Hunter, the Horse soon overcame the Stag and said to the Hunter: “Now get off, and remove those things from my mouth and back.” “Not so fast, friend,” said the Hunter. “I have now got you under bit and spur and prefer to keep you as you are at present.”

—“The Horse, the Stag, and the Hunter,” Aesop’s Fables

On October 30, 1922, Benito Mussolini arrived in Rome at 10:55 A.M. in an overnight sleeping car from Milan. He had been invited to the capital city by the king to accept Italy’s premiership and form a new cabinet. Accompanied by a small group of guards, Mussolini first stopped at the Hotel Savoia and then, wearing a black suit jacket, black shirt, and matching black bowler hat, walked triumphantly to the king’s Quirinal Palace. Rome was filled with rumors of unrest. Bands of Fascists—many in mismatched uniforms—roamed the city’s streets. Mussolini, aware of the power of the spectacle, strode into the king’s marble-floored residential palace and greeted him, “Sire, forgive my attire. I come from the battlefield.”

This was the beginning of Mussolini’s legendary “March on Rome.” The image of masses of Blackshirts crossing the Rubicon to seize power from Italy’s Liberal state became Fascist canon, repeated on national holidays and in children’s schoolbooks throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Mussolini did his part to enshrine the myth. At the last train stop before entering Rome that day, he had considered disembarking to ride into the city on horseback surrounded by his guards. Though the plan was ultimately abandoned, afterward he did all he could to bolster the legend of his rise to power as, in his own words, a “revolution” and “insurrectional act” that launched a new Fascist epoch.

The truth was more mundane. The bulk of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, often poorly fed and unarmed, arrived only after he had been invited to become prime minister. The squads of Fascists around the country were a menace, but Mussolini’s machinations to take the reins of state were no revolution. He used his party’s 35 parliamentary votes (out of 535), divisions among establishment politicians, fear of socialism, and the threat of violence by 30,000 Blackshirts to capture the attention of the timid King Victor Emmanuel III, who saw in Mussolini a rising political star and a means of neutralizing unrest.

With political order restored by Mussolini’s appointment and socialism in retreat, the Italian stock market soared. Elder statesmen of the Liberal establishment, such as Giovanni Giolitti and Antonio Salandra, found themselves applauding the turn of events. They regarded Mussolini as a useful ally. But not unlike the horse in Aesop’s fable, Italy soon found itself under “bit and spur.”

Some version of this story has repeated itself throughout the world over the last century. A cast of political outsiders, including Adolf Hitler, Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, Alberto Fujimori in Peru, and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, came to power on the same path: from the inside, via elections or alliances with powerful political figures. In each instance, elites believed the invitation to power would contain the outsider, leading to a restoration of control by mainstream politicians. But their plans backfired. A lethal mix of ambition, fear, and miscalculation conspired to lead them to the same fateful mistake: willingly handing over the keys of power to an autocrat-in-the-making.

Why do seasoned elder statesmen make this mistake? There are few more gripping illustrations than the rise of Adolf Hitler in January 1933. His capacity for violent insurrection was on display as early as Munich’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923—a surprise evening strike in which his group of pistol-bearing loyalists took control of several government buildings and a Munich beer hall where Bavarian officials were meeting. The ill-conceived attack was halted by the authorities, and Hitler spent nine months in jail, where he wrote his infamous personal testament, Mein Kampf. Thereafter, Hitler publicly committed to gaining power via elections. Initially, his National Socialist movement found few votes. The Weimar political system had been founded in 1919 by a prodemocratic coalition of Catholics, Liberals, and Social Democrats. But beginning in 1930, with the German economy reeling, the center-right fell prey to infighting, and the Communists and Nazis grew in popularity.

The elected government collapsed in March 1930 amid the pain of the Great Depression. With political gridlock blocking government action, the figurehead president, World War I hero Paul von Hindenburg, took advantage of a constitutional article giving the head of state the authority to name chancellors in the exceptional circumstance that parliament failed to deliver governing majorities. The aim of these unelected chancellors—and the president—was not only to govern but to sideline radicals on the left and right. First, Center Party economist Heinrich Brüning (who would later flee Germany to become a professor at Harvard) attempted, but failed, to restore economic growth; his time as chancellor was short-lived. President von Hindenburg turned next to nobleman Franz von Papen, and then, in growing despondency, to von Papen’s close friend and rival, former defense minister General Kurt von Schleicher. But without parliamentary majorities in the Reichstag, stalemate persisted. Leaders, for good reason, feared the next election.

Convinced that “something must finally give,” a cabal of rivalrous conservatives convened in late January 1933 and settled on a solution: A popular outsider should be placed at the head of the government. They despised him but knew that at least he had a mass following. And, most of all, they thought they could control him.

On January 30, 1933, von Papen, one of the chief architects of the plan, dismissed worries over the gamble that would make Adolf Hitler chancellor of a crisis-ridden Germany with the reassuring words: “We’ve engaged him for ourselves …. Within two months, we will have pushed [him] so far into a corner that he’ll squeal.” A more profound miscalculation is hard to imagine.

The Italian and German experiences highlight the type of “fateful alliance” that often elevates authoritarians to power. In any democracy, politicians will at times face severe challenges. Economic crisis, rising public discontent, and the electoral decline of mainstream political parties can test the judgment of even the most experienced insiders. If a charismatic outsider emerges on the scene, gaining popularity as he challenges the old order, it is tempting for establishment politicians who feel their control is unraveling to try to co-opt him. If an insider breaks ranks to embrace the insurgent before his rivals do, he can use the outsider’s energy and base to outmaneuver his peers. And then, establishment politicians hope, the insurgent can be redirected to support their own program.

This sort of devil’s bargain often mutates to the benefit of the insurgent, as alliances provide outsiders with enough respectability to become legitimate contenders for power. In early 1920s Italy, the old Liberal order was crumbling amid growing strikes and social unrest. The failure of traditional parties to forge solid parliamentary majorities left the elderly fifth-term prime minister Giovanni Giolitti desperate, and against the wishes of advisors he called early elections in May 1921. With the aim of tapping into the Fascists’ mass appeal, Giolitti decided to offer Mussolini’s upstart movement a place on his electoral group’s “bourgeois bloc” of Nationalists, Fascists, and Liberals. This strategy failed—the bourgeois bloc won less than 20 percent of the vote, leading to Giolitti’s resignation. But Mussolini’s place on the ticket gave his ragtag group the legitimacy it would need to enable its rise.

Such fateful alliances are hardly confined to interwar Europe. They also help to explain the rise of Hugo Chávez. Venezuela had prided itself on being South America’s oldest democracy, in place since 1958. Chávez, a junior military officer and failed coup leader who had never held public office, was a political outsider. But his rise to power was given a critical boost from a consummate insider: ex-president Rafael Caldera, one of the founders of Venezuelan democracy.

Venezuelan politics was long dominated by two parties, the center-left Democratic Action and Caldera’s center-right Social Christian Party (known as COPEI). The two alternated in power peacefully for more than thirty years, and by the 1970s, Venezuela was viewed as a model democracy in a region plagued by coups and dictatorships. During the 1980s, however, the country’s oil-dependent economy sank into a prolonged slump, a crisis that persisted for more than a decade, nearly doubling the poverty rate. Not surprisingly, Venezuelans grew disaffected. Massive riots in February 1989 suggested that the established parties were in trouble. Three years later, in February 1992, a group of junior military officers rose up against President Carlos Andrés Pérez. Led by Hugo Chávez, the rebels called themselves “Bolivarians,” after revered independence hero Simón Bolívar. The coup failed. But when the now-detained Chávez appeared on live television to tell his supporters to lay down their arms (declaring, in words that would become legendary, that their mission had failed “for now”), he became a hero in the eyes of many Venezuelans, particularly poorer ones. Following a second failed coup in November 1992, the imprisoned Chávez changed course, opting to pursue power via elections. He would need help.

Although ex-president Caldera was a well-regarded elder statesman, his political career was waning in 1992. Four years earlier, he had failed to secure his party’s presidential nomination, and he was now considered a political relic. But the seventy-six-year-old senator still dreamed of returning to the presidency, and Chávez’s emergence provided him with a lifeline. On the night of Chávez’s initial coup, the former president stood up during an emergency joint session of congress and embraced the rebels’ cause, declaring:

It is difficult to ask the people to sacrifice themselves for freedom and democracy when they think that freedom and democracy are incapable of giving them food to eat, of preventing the astronomical rise in the cost of subsistence, or of placing a definitive end to the terrible scourge of corruption that, in the eyes of the entire world, is eating away at the institutions of Venezuela with each passing day.

The stunning speech resurrected Caldera’s political career. Having tapped into Chávez’s antisystem constituency, the ex-president’s public support swelled, which allowed him to make a successful presidential bid in 1993.

Caldera’s public flirtation with Chávez did more than boost his own standing in the polls; it also gave Chávez new credibility. Chávez and his comrades had sought to destroy their country’s thirty-four-year-old democracy. But rather than denouncing the coup leaders as an extremist threat, the former president offered them public sympathy—and, with it, an opening to mainstream politics.

Caldera also helped open the gates to the presidential palace for Chávez by dealing a mortal blow to Venezuela’s established parties. In a stunning about-face, he abandoned COPEI, the party he had founded nearly half a century earlier, and launched an independent presidential bid. To be sure, the parties were already in crisis. But Caldera’s departure and subsequent antiestablishment campaign helped bury them. The party system collapsed after Caldera’s 1993 election as an antiparty independent, paving the way for future outsiders. Five years later, it would be Chávez’s turn.

But back in 1993, Chávez still had a major problem. He was in jail, awaiting trial for treason. However, in 1994, now-President Caldera dropped all charges against him. Caldera’s final act in enabling Chávez was literally opening the gates—of prison—for him. Immediately after Chávez’s release, a reporter asked him where he was going. “To power,” he replied. Freeing Chávez was popular, and Caldera had promised such a move during the campaign. Like most Venezuelan elites, he viewed Chávez as a passing fad—someone who would likely fall out of public favor by the time of the next election. But in dropping all charges, rather than allowing Chávez to stand trial and then pardoning him, Caldera elevated him, transforming the former coup leader overnight into a viable presidential candidate. On December 6, 1998, Chávez won the presidency, easily defeating an establishment-backed candidate. On inauguration day, Caldera, the outgoing president, could not bring himself to deliver the oath of office to Chávez, as tradition dictated. Instead, he stood glumly off to one side.

Despite their vast differences, Hitler, Mussolini, and Chávez followed routes to power that share striking similarities. Not only were they all outsiders with a flair for capturing public attention, but each of them rose to power because establishment politicians overlooked the warning signs and either handed over power to them (Hitler and Mussolini) or opened the door for them (Chávez).

The abdication of political responsibility by existing leaders often marks a nation’s first step toward authoritarianism. Years after Chávez’s presidential victory, Rafael Caldera explained his mistakes simply: “Nobody thought that Mr. Chávez had even the remotest chance of becoming president.” And merely a day after Hitler became chancellor, a prominent conservative who aided him admitted, “I have just committed the greatest stupidity of my life; I have allied myself with the greatest demagogue in world history.”

Not all democracies have fallen into this trap. Some—including Belgium, Britain, Costa Rica, and Finland—have faced challenges from demagogues but also have managed to keep them out of power. How have they done it? It is tempting to think this survival is rooted in the collective wisdom of voters. Maybe Belgians and Costa Ricans were simply more democratic than their counterparts in Germany or Italy. After all, we like to believe that the fate of a government lies in the hands of its citizens. If the people hold democratic values, democracy will be safe. If citizens are open to authoritarian appeals, then, sooner or later, democracy will be in trouble.

This view is wrong. It assumes too much of democracy—that “the people” can shape at will the kind of government they possess. It’s hard to find any evidence of majority support for authoritarianism in 1920s Germany and Italy. Before the Nazis and Fascists seized power, less than 2 percent of the population were party members, and neither party achieved anything close to a majority of the vote in free and fair elections. Rather, solid electoral majorities opposed Hitler and Mussolini—before both men achieved power with the support of political insiders blind to the danger of their own ambitions.

Hugo Chávez was elected by a majority of voters, but there is little evidence that Venezuelans were looking for a strongman. At the time, public support for democracy was higher there than in Chile—a country that was, and remains, stably democratic. According to the 1998 Latinobarómetro survey, 60 percent of Venezuelans agreed with the statement “Democracy is always the best form of government,” while only 25 percent agreed that “under some circumstances, an authoritarian government can be preferable to a democratic one.” By contrast, only 53 percent of respondents in Chile agreed that “democracy is always the best form of government.”

Potential demagogues exist in all democracies, and occasionally, one or more of them strike a public chord. But in some democracies, political leaders heed the warning signs and take steps to ensure that authoritarians remain on the fringes, far from the centers of power. When faced with the rise of extremists or demagogues, they make a concerted effort to isolate and defeat them. Although mass responses to extremist appeals matter, what matters more is whether political elites, and especially parties, serve as filters. Put simply, political parties are democracy’s gatekeepers.

If authoritarians are to be kept out, they first have to be identified. There is, alas, no foolproof advance warning system. Many authoritarians can be easily recognized before they come to power. They have a clear track record: Hitler led a failed putsch; Chávez led a failed military uprising; Mussolini’s Blackshirts engaged in paramilitary violence; and in Argentina in the mid–twentieth century, Juan Perón helped lead a successful coup two and a half years before running for president.

But politicians do not always reveal the full scale of their authoritarianism before reaching power. Some adhere to democratic norms early in their careers, only to abandon them later. Consider Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Orbán and his Fidesz party began as liberal democrats in the late 1980s, and in his first stint as prime minister between 1998 and 2002, Orbán governed democratically. His autocratic about-face after returning to power in 2010 was a genuine surprise.

So how do we identify authoritarianism in politicians who don’t have an obvious antidemocratic record? Here we turn to the eminent political scientist Juan Linz. Born in Weimar Germany and raised amid Spain’s civil war, Linz knew all too well the perils of losing a democracy. As a professor at Yale, he devoted much of his career to trying to understand how and why democracies die. Many of Linz’s conclusions can be found in a small but seminal book called The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes. Published in 1978, the book highlights the role of politicians, showing how their behavior can either reinforce democracy or put it at risk. He also proposed, but never fully developed, a “litmus test” for identifying antidemocratic politicians.

Building on Linz’s work, we have developed a set of four behavioral warning signs that can help us know an authoritarian when we see one. We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media. Table 1 shows how to assess politicians in terms of these four factors.

A politician who meets even one of these criteria is cause for concern. What kinds of candidates tend to test positive on a litmus test for authoritarianism? Very often, populist outsiders do. Populists are antiestablishment politicians—figures who, claiming to represent the voice of “the people,” wage war on what they depict as a corrupt and conspiratorial elite. Populists tend to deny the legitimacy of established parties, attacking them as undemocratic and even unpatriotic. They tell voters that the existing system is not really a democracy but instead has been hijacked, corrupted, or rigged by the elite. And they promise to bury that elite and return power to “the people.” This discourse should be taken seriously. When populists win elections, they often assault democratic institutions. In Latin America, for example, of all fifteen presidents elected in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela between 1990 and 2012, five were populist outsiders: Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, Lucio Gutiérrez, and Rafael Correa. All five ended up weakening democratic institutions.

Table 1: Four Key Indicators of Authoritarian Behavior

1. Rejection of (or weak commitment to) democratic rules of the game	Do they reject the Constitution or express a willingness to violate it?
	Do they suggest a need for antidemocratic measures, such as canceling elections, violating or suspending the Constitution, banning certain organizations, or restricting basic civil or political rights?
	Do they seek to use (or endorse the use of) extraconstitutional means to change the government, such as military coups, violent insurrections, or mass protests aimed at forcing a change in the government?
	Do they attempt to undermine the legitimacy of elections, for example, by refusing to accept credible electoral results?
2. Denial of the legitimacy of political opponents	Do they describe their rivals as subversive, or opposed to the existing constitutional order?
	Do they claim that their rivals constitute an existential threat, either to national security or to the prevailing way of life?
	Do they baselessly describe their partisan rivals as criminals, whose supposed violation of the law (or potential to do so) disqualifies them from full participation in the political arena?
	Do they baselessly suggest that their rivals are foreign agents, in that they are secretly working in alliance with (or the employ of) a foreign government—usually an enemy one?
3. Toleration or encouragement of violence	Do they have any ties to armed gangs, paramilitary forces, militias, guerrillas, or other organizations that engage in illicit violence?
	Have they or their partisan allies sponsored or encouraged mob attacks on opponents?
	Have they tacitly endorsed violence by their supporters by refusing to unambiguously condemn it and punish it?
	Have they praised (or refused to condemn) other significant acts of political violence, either in the past or elsewhere in the world?
4. Readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media	Have they supported laws or policies that restrict civil liberties, such as expanded libel or defamation laws, or laws restricting protest, criticism of the government, or certain civic or political organizations?
	Have they threatened to take legal or other punitive action against critics in rival parties, civil society, or the media?
	Have they praised repressive measures taken by other governments, either in the past or elsewhere in the world?

Keeping authoritarian politicians out of power is more easily said than done. Democracies, after all, are not supposed to ban parties or prohibit candidates from standing for election—and we do not advocate such measures. The responsibility for filtering out authoritarians lies, rather, with political parties and party leaders: democracy’s gatekeepers.

Successful gatekeeping requires that mainstream parties isolate and defeat extremist forces, a behavior political scientist Nancy Bermeo calls “distancing.” Prodemocratic parties may engage in distancing in several ways. First, they can keep would-be authoritarians off party ballots at election time. This requires that they resist the temptation to nominate these extremists for higher office even when they can potentially deliver votes.

Second, parties can root out extremists in the grass roots of their own ranks. Take the Swedish Conservative Party (AVF) during the perilous interwar period. The AVF’s youth group (an organization of voting-age activists), called the Swedish Nationalist Youth Organization, grew increasingly radical in the early 1930s, criticizing parliamentary democracy, openly supporting Hitler, and even creating a group of uniformed storm troopers. The AVF responded in 1933 by expelling the organization. The loss of 25,000 members may have cost the AVF votes in the 1934 municipal elections, but the party’s distancing strategy reduced the influence of antidemocratic forces in Sweden’s largest center-right party.

Third, prodemocratic parties can avoid all alliances with antidemocratic parties and candidates. As we saw in Italy and Germany, prodemocratic parties are sometimes tempted to align with extremists on their ideological flank to win votes or, in parliamentary systems, form governments. But such alliances can have devastating long-term consequences. As Linz wrote, the demise of many democracies can be traced to a party’s “greater affinity for extremists on its side of the political spectrum than for [mainstream] parties close to the opposite side.”

Fourth, prodemocratic parties can act to systematically isolate, rather than legitimize, extremists. This requires that politicians avoid acts—such as German Conservatives’ joint rallies with Hitler in the early 1930s or Caldera’s speech sympathizing with Chávez—that help to “normalize” or provide public respectability to authoritarian figures.

Finally, whenever extremists emerge as serious electoral contenders, mainstream parties must forge a united front to defeat them. To quote Linz, they must be willing to “join with opponents ideologically distant but committed to the survival of the democratic political order.” In normal circumstances, this is almost unimaginable. Picture Senator Edward Kennedy and other liberal Democrats campaigning for Ronald Reagan, or the British Labour Party and their trade union allies endorsing Margaret Thatcher. Each party’s followers would be infuriated at this seeming betrayal of principles. But in extraordinary times, courageous party leadership means putting democracy and country before party and articulating to voters what is at stake. When a party or politician that tests positive on our litmus test emerges as a serious electoral threat, there is little alternative. United democratic fronts can prevent extremists from winning power, which can mean saving a democracy.

Although the failures are more memorable, some European democracies practiced successful gatekeeping between the wars. Surprisingly big lessons can be drawn from small countries. Consider Belgium and Finland. In Europe’s years of political and economic crisis in the 1920s and 1930s, both countries experienced an early warning sign of democratic decay—the rise of antisystem extremists—but, unlike Italy and Germany, they were saved by political elites who defended democratic institutions (at least until Nazi invasion several years later).

During Belgium’s 1936 general election, as the contagion of fascism was spreading from Italy and Germany across Europe, voters delivered a jarring result. Two authoritarian far-right parties—the Rex Party and the Flemish nationalist party, or Vlaams Nationaal Verbond (VNV)—surged in the polls, capturing almost 20 percent of the popular vote and challenging the historical dominance of three establishment parties: the center-right Catholic Party, the Socialists, and the Liberal Party. The challenge from the leader of the Rex Party, Léon Degrelle, a Catholic journalist who would become a Nazi collaborator, was especially strong. Degrelle, a virulent critic of parliamentary democracy, had departed from the right edges of the Catholic Party and now attacked its leaders as corrupt. He received encouragement and financial support from both Hitler and Mussolini.

The 1936 election shook the centrist parties, which suffered losses across the board. Aware of the antidemocratic movements in nearby Italy and Germany and fearful for their own survival, they confronted the daunting task of deciding how to respond. The Catholic Party, in particular, faced a difficult dilemma: collaborate with their longtime rivals, the Socialists and Liberals, or forge a right-wing alliance that included the Rexists, a party with whom they shared some ideological affinity but that rejected the value of democratic politics.

Unlike the retreating mainstream politicians of Italy and Germany, the Belgian Catholic leadership declared that any cooperation with the Rexists was incompatible with party membership and then pursued a two-pronged strategy to combat the movement. Internally, Catholic Party leaders heightened discipline by screening candidates for pro-Rexist sympathies and expelling those who expressed extremist views. In addition, the party leadership took a strong stance against cooperation with the far right. Externally, the Catholic Party fought Rex on its own turf. The Catholic Party adopted new propaganda and campaign tactics that targeted younger Catholics, who had formerly been part of the Rexist base. They created the Catholic Youth Front in December 1935 and began to run former allies against Degrelle.

The final clash between Rex and the Catholic Party, in which Rex was effectively sidelined (until the Nazi occupation), centered around the formation of a new government after the 1936 election. The Catholic Party supported the incumbent Catholic prime minister Paul van Zeeland. After van Zeeland regained the premiership, there were two chief options for forming a government: The first was an alliance with the rival Socialists, along the lines of France’s “Popular Front,” which van Zeeland and other Catholic leaders had initially hoped to avoid. The second was a right-wing alliance of antisocialist forces that would include Rex and VNV. The choice was not easy; the second option was supported by a traditionalist faction that sought to upset the fragile van Zeeland cabinet by rallying the Catholic rank and file, organizing a “March on Brussels,” and forcing a by-election in which Rex leader Degrelle would run against van Zeeland. These plans were thwarted in 1937 when Degrelle lost the by-election, largely because the Catholic Party MPs had taken a stand: They refused to go with the traditionalists’ plan and instead united with the Liberals and Socialists behind van Zeeland. This was the Catholic Party’s most important gatekeeping act.

The Catholic Party’s stand on the right was also made possible by King Leopold III and the Socialist Party. The election of 1936 had left the Socialist Party as the largest party in the legislature, which gave it the prerogative to form a government. However, when it became evident that the Socialists could not gain enough parliamentary support, rather than call a new election—which may have handed even more seats to extremist parties—the king met with leaders of the largest parties to talk them into a power-sharing cabinet, led by incumbent prime minister van Zeeland, which would include both the conservative Catholics and the Socialists but exclude antisystem parties on both sides. Although the Socialists distrusted van Zeeland, a Catholic Party man, they nevertheless put democracy ahead of their own interests and endorsed the grand coalition.

A similar dynamic unfolded in Finland, where the extreme-right Lapua Movement burst onto the political stage in 1929, threatening the country’s fragile democracy. The movement sought the destruction of communism by any means necessary. It threatened violence if its demands were not met and attacked mainstream politicians whom it deemed collaborators with Socialists. At first, politicians from the governing center-right Agrarian Union flirted with the Lapua Movement, finding its anticommunism politically useful; they met the movement’s demands to deny communist political rights while tolerating extreme-right violence. In 1930, P. E. Svinhufvud, a conservative whom the Lapua leaders considered “one of their own,” became prime minister, and he offered them two cabinet posts. A year later, Svinhufvud became president. Yet the Lapua Movement continued its extremist behavior; with the communists banned, it targeted the more moderate Social Democratic Party. Lapua thugs abducted more than a thousand Social Democrats, including union leaders and members of parliament. The Lapua Movement also organized a 12,000-person march on Helsinki (modeled on the mythical March on Rome), and in 1932, it backed a failed putsch aimed at replacing the government with one that was “apolitical” and “patriotic.”

As the Lapua Movement grew more radical, however, Finland’s traditional conservative parties broke decisively with it. In late 1930, the bulk of the Agrarian Union, the liberal Progress Party, and much of the Swedish People’s Party joined their main ideological rival, the Social Democrats, in the so-called Lawfulness Front to defend democracy against violent extremists. Even the conservative president, Svinhufvud, forcefully rejected—and eventually banned—his former allies. The Lapua Movement was left isolated, and Finland’s brief burst of fascism was aborted.

It is not only in distant historical cases that one finds successful gatekeeping. In Austria in 2016, the main center-right party (the Austrian People’s Party, ÖVP) effectively kept the radical-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) out of the presidency. Austria has a long history of extreme right politics, and the FPÖ is one of Europe’s strongest far-right parties. Austria’s political system was growing vulnerable because the two main parties, the Social Democratic SPÖ and the Christian Democratic ÖVP, which had alternated in the presidency throughout the postwar period, were weakening. In 2016, their dominance was challenged by two upstarts—the Green Party’s former chairman, Alexander Van der Bellen, and the extremist FPÖ leader Norbert Hofer.

To the surprise of most analysts, the first round left Van der Bellen and the right-wing outsider Hofer as the two candidates in a second-round runoff. After a procedural error in October 2016, the runoff was held in December. At this point, several leading politicians, including some from the conservative ÖVP, argued that Hofer and his Freedom Party had to be defeated. Hofer had appeared to encourage violence against immigrants, and many questioned whether an elected Hofer would privilege his party in ways that violated long-standing norms of the president remaining above politics. In the face of this threat, some important ÖVP leaders worked to defeat Hofer by supporting their ideological rival, the left-leaning Green candidate, Van der Bellen. The ÖVP’s presidential candidate, Andreas Khol, endorsed Van der Bellen, as did Chairman Rein-hold Mitterlehner, Cabinet Minister Sophie Karmasin, and dozens of ÖVP mayors in the Austrian countryside. In one letter, former chairman Erhard Busek wrote that he endorsed Van der Bellen “not with passion but after careful deliberation,” and that, furthermore, the decision was motivated by the sentiment that “we don’t want congratulations from Le Pen, Jobbik, Wilders and the AfD [and other extremists] after our presidential elections.” Van der Bellen won by a mere 300,000 votes.

This stance took considerable political courage. According to one Catholic Party mayor of a small city outside Vienna, Stefan Schmuckenschlager, who endorsed the Green Party candidate, it was a decision that split families. His twin brother, another party leader, had supported Hofer. As Schmuckenschlager explained it, power politics sometimes has to be put aside to do the right thing.

Did the endorsements from the ÖVP help? There is evidence that they did. According to exit polls, 55 percent of respondents who identified as ÖVP supporters said they voted for Van der Bellen, and 48 percent of Van der Bellen voters said they had voted for him to prevent Hofer from winning. In addition, the strong urban/rural division that has always marked Austrian politics (between left-wing urban areas and right-wing rural areas) was dramatically diminished in the second round in December 2016, with a surprising number of traditional rural conservative states switching to vote for Van der Bellen.

In short, in 2016, responsible leaders in the ÖVP resisted the temptation to ally with an extremist party on their own ideological flank, and the result was that party’s defeat. The FPÖ’s strong performance in the 2017 parliamentary elections, which positioned it to become a junior partner in a new right-wing government, made it clear that the dilemma facing Austrian conservatives persists. Still, their effort to keep an extremist out of the presidency provides a useful model of contemporary gatekeeping.

For its part, the United States has an impressive record of gatekeeping. Both Democrats and Republicans have confronted extremist figures on their fringes, some of whom enjoyed considerable public support. For decades, both parties succeeded in keeping these figures out of the mainstream. Until, of course, 2016.

Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt

HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE

VIKING

Contents

1

Fateful Alliances

Table 1: Four Key Indicators of Authoritarian Behavior