The Latest Breaking News from Democracy

More than a decade ago, scholars began pointing to a troubling global trend: a "democratic recession." Dozens of countries were drifting away from democracy toward authoritarianism.

Democrats have an opportunity to seize the moral high ground as the party of justice. Will they take it?

A week before the midterm election, President Joe Biden pitched senior advisers on his closing argument to American voters — a sweeping address in which he’d once again insist that democracy itself was on the ballot.

When the final election results were announced around 4pm on Sunday, many Fijians, at home and around the world, breathed a collective sigh of relief: the government of coup-maker Frank Bainimarama looked like it had finally been defeated at the ballot box.

In 2002, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP), obtained a parliamentary majority in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. The seemingly unstoppable rise of political Islam throughout the turbulent 1990s had finally culminated in a much-dreaded loss for a Kemalist political establishment committed to…

Tunisians on Saturday voted to elect a new parliament, to the backdrop of a soaring cost-of-living crisis and concerns of democracy backsliding in the North African country.

Qatargate scandal shows how insider corruption, influence-peddling and money-politics can erode public trust, says Observer columnist Simon Tisdall

Tunisians on Saturday overwhelmingly boycotted an election for a new parliament, and electoral board president Farouk Bouasker said that by close of polls at 6:00 pm (1700 GMT), just 8.8 percent of the nine-million-strong electorate had cast votes. That would be the lowest participation in any poll since the revolution,…

Since the 1998 ouster of the dictator Suharto -- who ruled Indonesia with an iron fist for over three decades -- the world's fourth most populous nation has undergone a series of rapid changes. Once dependent on foreign aid to exercise its basic functions, Indonesia has firmly established itself as…

After sending in tanks to shutter Tunisia’s last parliament, the leader of a nation once seen as the Arab world’s most progressive democracy is taking no chances in the vote for its successor.

The conference will take place in Edinburgh next March 19.