The Fall of a Model Democracy

The recipe is not a good one: a brazen businessman, a contentious election, and a hint of criminality.

Those troubling ingredients were brought to a boil in Benin this month as one of the world’s strongest democracies saw opposition parties barred from running for office, protesters taking to the streets, and an unknown number of arrests and deaths. As demonstrations grew over April’s parliamentary elections, President Patrice Talon also blocked access to the internet and unleashed the police. The story might seem routine in other parts of the developing world, but it’s an anomaly in Benin, which sparked a wave of African democratization in the 1990s and has remained resistant to breakdown and backsliding ever since.

After three decades of peace and progress, the West African nation,” a term the political scientist Larry Diamond coined to describe an apparent trend that has taken its toll on every continent. From populist victories in the United States and Britain to far-right parties entrenching themselves in power in Brazil and Hungary, as well as emboldened authoritarians in Turkey and the Philippines, the erosion of the quantity and quality of democracy has become worrying. Now Benin joins the list.