My guide to populist-proofing your democracy – before it’s too late | Timothy Garton Ash

How can we defend our democracies against those who would destroy them? We talk a lot about strategies for keeping anti-liberal, nationalist populists out of power, but Donald Trump’s daily wielding of a wrecking ball shows that it’s equally important to reinforce your democracy so it can withstand a period of populists in power.

Germany has a concept called wehrhafte Demokratie, often weirdly translated as “militant democracy” but actually meaning a democracy capable of defending itself. Under this motto, some in Germany are proposing to ban Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), now one of the most popular parties in the country. That’s the wrong way to go. It would only reinforce the far-right party’s supporters in their conviction that the democratic state itself is a kind of liberal elitist conspiracy, and impart to the AfD the nimbus of martyrdom. The French experiment of a “republican arc”, in which virtually all the other parties agree only on keeping out Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, is also visibly backfiring. Such a wide range of parties unsurprisingly fails to agree on urgently needed reforms and the National Rally can go on criticising from the sidelines. So it’s worth contemplating the example of the Netherlands, where the party of the inflammatory populist Geert Wilders was allowed into power in a coalition government, failed to deliver, brought that government down by withdrawing from the coalition, and lost the subsequent election (albeit only narrowly) to a liberal party led by the young, dynamic Rob Jetten.

But if you’re going to take the risk of letting populists into government, you need first to reinforce the defences of your democracy – otherwise they will use democracy to dismantle democracy, as Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary and Trump is trying to do in the US. Salami slice by salami slice, these once liberal democracies become what political scientists call an electoral authoritarian system. There are still elections, but they are not free and fair.

Here are a few things to look at, if you want to populist-proof your democracy.

Proportional representation

A winner-takes-all two-party system, such as the US has – and the UK largely still has in Westminster, despite the recent fragmentation of its party landscape – may be helpful until a nationalist populist takes over one of the two big parties, as Trump has done. Then it’s worse. Better to have proportional representation, so the populists will be constrained by coalition partners, as in the Netherlands and much of continental Europe.

Electoral administration

A little nerdy perhaps, but this matters. The absurdly archaic US system, in which each of the 50 states has its own different procedures, is a standing invitation to partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression and all the other dirty tricks on which Republicans are plainly hellbent in advance of next autumn’s midterm elections.

Public service broadcasting

The shared public sphere we need for democracy is everywhere being eroded by the simultaneous fragmentation and polarisation that results from the US capitalist version of the digital revolution. There are few easy remedies. If, however, you have a trusted public service broadcaster, as in Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany or Scandinavia, you should hang on to it for dear life, further ringfence its editorial independence, double its budget and increase its presence on social media. That Britain is doing the precise opposite by undermining the BBC, probably the world’s most widely respected public service broadcaster, is just another example of the country’s seemingly endless capacity for national self-harming.

Media ownership

Censorship is so old-fashioned. The modern authoritarian controls speech through ownership. In Turkey and Hungary, the leaders’ oligarchic cronies own the key media. At first glance, it may look like perfect media pluralism; behind the mask, the reality is entirely different. It’s almost impossible to formulate a general rule on this. Foreign ownership, for example, has been a curse of British newspapers (think Rupert Murdoch) but a blessing for the defence of democracy in some post-communist countries (the broadcaster TVN in Poland, for example). It’s horses for courses.

Independent judiciary

Obvious, but so vital. The judicial chaos in Poland today, where the governing coalition is disputing the legitimacy of judges appointed by the previous populist government, shows what happens when the rule of law has been lost. Germany recently saw a disastrous incident in which the candidacy of a left-liberal legal scholar for a seat on the constitutional court, already approved by the relevant cross-party parliamentary committee, was derailed by a group of rebel conservatives. Like the attacks on the BBC, this is precisely the wrong thing to do when you have populists at the gate. Unlike the US supreme court, the UK supreme court has kept its reputation for impartiality. But when the shadow justice minister, Robert Jenrick, waves a judge’s wig in front of his party conference while denouncing leftwing activist judges, we see that the Trumpian threat is not far away.

Civil service neutrality

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, much of the substance of which the Trump administration is implementing, explicitly recommended the subordination of the administrative state to the executive. Perhaps most worryingly, this is already happening in the US department of justice, where hundreds of officials have either been sacked or have resigned. Indictments of outspoken critics, such as John Bolton, James Comey and Letitia James, have followed.

Constitutional monarchy

You laugh? But asked by Yascha Mounk on his The Good Fight podcast how we can best defend liberal democracies, the leading American comparative constitutionalist Tom Ginsburg unexpectedly singled out the advantages of having a constitutional monarchy. Anti-liberal populists claim to speak on behalf of the nation, but if you have a constitutional monarch who is the undisputed, non-partisan top representative of the nation, that space is at least partly occupied. I’m not suggesting that the US should bring back one of the heirs to George III (although a British royal spare is available in LA), but if you happen to have a constitutional monarchy, like Britain, Sweden or the Netherlands, do preserve it – for in practice it is, quite paradoxically, a bulwark of democracy.

I could mention many other areas, such as security services, the military, universities, and the incestuous, neo-oligarchic relationships between big money and politics. In each case, the specific national answers will differ, and none of them will be easy. It helps to have detailed provisions in a hard-to-change constitution, but what James Madison in Federalist Paper 48 memorably called “parchment barriers” are no guarantee in themselves. It needs us, the people, to mobilise to protect them. When I was in Prague last month, my Czech friends were preparing to defend their public service television and radio, on the streets if need be.

For what’s painfully clear is that once you’ve lost any of these essential checks and balances, they are very hard to restore. Destruction is so much easier than construction. Just look at the mess Poland is in today, and the US will be tomorrow. For liberal democracy, as for health, prevention is better than cure.

• Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist