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The democracy playbook is broken — we must rewrite it

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by Rudina Hajdari, opinion contributor - 04/24/26 1:00 PM ET

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by Rudina Hajdari, opinion contributor - 04/24/26 1:00 PM ET

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Peter Magyar gestures as he speaks to the media in Budapest, Hungary, Monday, April 13, 2026, after defeating Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s party in the country’s parliamentary elections. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)

When I was a child in Albania, my father was killed for helping dismantle one of Europe’s harshest communist regimes. He believed that if you built democratic institutions, they would protect the people who built them.

He was right about the dream. He was wrong about its durability.

I came to the U.S. carrying his sacrifice and a question that has shaped my life: What does democracy actually deliver, and under what conditions does it fail?

Across the world, confidence in democratic institutions is eroding. From long-established democracies to fragile transitions, the warning signs are no longer isolated. This is no longer a challenge confined to emerging systems. It is global.

At Columbia University, I learned the prevailing answer: that democracy rests on universal principles that can be applied anywhere. Elections, institutions, constitutional norms. The model has been refined in Washington and Brussels and is expected to travel.

For a time, I believed this.

Then came the shocks: 9/11, the financial crisis, COVID, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Oct. 7, and now the Iran war. Each crisis exposed something the model had not accounted for — fear, anxiety, identity, memory. Some forces shape political life long before institutions can stabilize it.

What I came to understand is democracy is not failing because its ideals are wrong. It is faltering because its implementation has been too rigid and too detached from the societies it is meant to serve.

For decades, democracy promotion has followed a single script. Write constitutions. Hold elections. Build institutions. The assumption was that what worked in one context could be transferred to another.

That assumption was flawed from the start.

What the traditional playbook consistently misses are the hardest variables to translate: political culture, historical grievance, informal power structures, ethnic tensions, and collective memory.

Hungary’s recent election illustrates the point. Peter Magyar is not the kind of democrat the traditional playbook instinctively champions: a conservative, nationally rooted figure advancing democratic renewal in recognizably Hungarian terms. But that is, in fact, the lesson. Democracy endures when it is rebuilt through the language, memory, and political realities of the societies it serves.

These types of local knowledge and culture are not secondary details. They are the terrain democracy must operate on. When they are ignored, institutions become fragile, or worse, performative.

We are now living with the consequences. Democratic backsliding is not confined to one region or ideology. It is widespread. And the institutions designed to support democracy are increasingly where it is contested.

This is a humbling moment. And it should be.

The answer is not to repeat the old model more loudly, but to rethink who defines solutions in the first place.

In my experience in the Albanian Parliament and later with the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, the same gap kept appearing. Those designing democracy support programs are often far removed from the pressures of governing in fragile systems.

The most useful knowledge is not abstract. It is lived. The most valuable support for a leader under strain is another leader who has faced something similar and found a way through.

When an official in Romania is defending electoral systems from foreign interference, the most relevant insight comes from someone who has done it. When a reformer in Egypt is navigating restricted information environments, the most useful guidance comes from someone who has survived the same constraints.

This is what my organization is trying to build: structured peer exchange grounded in lived political experience.Not a framework or a communiqué, but a network of trust between people who understand the pressures of governance and can share what actually works. This kind of infrastructure is slower to build and harder to measure, but far more resilient.

I grew up between two worlds: the one my father died trying to create, and the one his sacrifice helped make possible. My generation has lived through enough crises to know that democracy is neither inevitable nor self-sustaining.

What we owe the next generation is not rhetoric about its strength, but the work required to make it stronger.

My father gave everything. What I can offer is more modest: