The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 paved the way for the democratisation of many eastern European countries and triumphantly ushered in the era of global liberal democracy that some scholars celebrated as “the end of history”. The idea was that human political history followed a steady path and that western liberal democracy was the end point of the evolution of human government. Unfortunately, events unfolded a little differently.
The last 20 years did not follow a linear arc of progress, let alone marked the end of history. The growing electoral success of extreme rightwing parties in many western countries, from France to Finland and from the Netherlands to Germany, has turned the end of history into the possible end of democracy.
