We asked activists from authoritarian regimes what they wish they’d known sooner. Here’s what they said

Donald Trump makes no secret of his admiration for strongmen like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Last month, he praised Orbán’s hardline stance on immigration and urged European leaders to show more “respect” for the president; earlier this year his administration struck a deal with Bukele to send more than 200 detained migrants to a notorious, maximum-security prison in El Salvador.

Many international organizations, experts and historians have sounded the alarm about the United States heading in a similar direction as these authoritarian regimes.

One year after Trump’s re-election, the Guardian asked activists and opposition leaders from Hungary, El Salvador and Turkey what their experiences have taught them about authoritarianism – and what they wish they’d understood sooner.

Americans “should look to other countries, especially in the global south for solutions and for what not to do,” said Ece Temelkuran, a Turkish writer and author of How to Lose a Country. “Drop the arrogance, drop the exceptionalism.”

Stefania Kapronczay (Hungary), former head of the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union

Stefania Kapronczay. Photograph: Daniel Byers

Trump’s consolidation of power in the US echoes prime minister Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian power grabs in Hungary, says Kapronczay. But with one important difference.

“It’s happening much faster, and it’s surprising for me that so many private companies and institutions just complied with the perceived or expressed will of President Trump,” she said. “I didn’t expect so many people would be so risk-averse.”

Orbán first rose to power in 1998 amid widespread disillusionment with the country’s political establishment during the post-cold war era. “Democracy promised economic prosperity and more equality, and it just didn’t deliver that,” said Kapronczay, now a senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute.

Even though his party lost control of parliament in 2002, Orbán returned as prime minister in 2010, and has since tightened his grip on power, changing voting rules to favor his party; stacking the judicial system with loyalists; and cracking down on universities, NGOs and the press. In 2022, the European parliament declared Hungary a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy”.

In the period after his 2010 re-election, Orbán’s government pushed reforms that created some stability for the poorest of the society, Kapronczay said. “Authoritarians are responding to clear needs and frustration and anger in society.”

Kapronczay says she’s learned that opposition leaders need to pay closer attention to pocketbook issues. “Standing up for democracy, resisting and all this very abstract language will not reach the majority of society,” she said. “It’s only a very small progressive circle that resonates with that kind of messaging.”

But the authoritarian turn also “posed an opportunity for self-reflection”, she said. “If our previous tools are no longer working, how can we serve our mission in a more impactful way?”

For example, between 2010 and 2012, Orbán’s party restructured Hungary’s constitutional court, stacking the bench with political appointees and restricting its jurisdiction. “We [in civil society] were very concerned – and I think rightly so – but for a lot of people, the court was something really far away,” Kapronczay said. Many civil society groups failed to address everyday issues, like household incomes, schools and healthcare – “Even though these are the very issues [that affect whether people] feel a political system is working for them and whether they can make their voice heard,” she said.

Kapronczay says protests are important – particularly if the political opposition builds on them – but so are small, local gatherings that bring together people from a range of backgrounds and ideologies to solve shared concerns. “Autocrats really want to polarize the society, so any kind of initiative that goes against it is really important,” she said.

Hungary’s opposition has renewed energy in recent months. In June, tens of thousands of people, including Budapest’s mayor, showed up for a LGBTQ+ Pride parade that Orbán had banned. And polling shows that the opposition Tisza party, led by Péter Magyar, is leading Fidesz, Orbán’s party, ahead of next year’s elections.

“A lot of people believe that they can actually win the elections next year,” Kapronczay said. “Finally, there is a real competition, and that has enabled a lot of people to come out from self-censorship. My friends who are journalists say they have more sources coming forward. People are not so afraid to speak. Civil society and public life is much more vibrant than it has been in the past few years.”

Ece Temelkuran (Turkey), author of How to Lose a Country

Ece Temelkuran. Photograph: Ece Temelkuran/Joanna Paciorek

Temelkuran says that while Recep Tayyip Erdoğan started to consolidate power during his first term as prime minister, it was his re-election, in 2007, that marked a “real shift” in Turkish politics.

“When they come to power for the second time, they feel more ruthless, and they behave as if there are no boundaries any more,” said Temelkuran. “I think especially in the leader’s head, that association of ‘me and the country’ [being] the same thing becomes very prominent when they seize power for the second time.”

Temelkuran had been reporting throughout Turkey as a columnist for the newspaper ​​Milliyet during Erdoğan’s rise in 2002. Early on, she saw his authoritarian tendencies: he regularly disparaged journalists and seemed to have little interest in politics as usual.

“[Autocrats] declare themselves as beyond politics,” said Temelkuran. “[They say:] ‘Politics is corrupt. Parties are corrupt. We’re clean.’ They create a movement, not a party.

“When you despise politics, that means that you are probably going to do something to democracy itself,” she added.

In the years since he became president in 2014, Erdoğan has jailed political opponents and critics, cracked down on protests and concentrated power in the executive branch.

After writing about Erdoğan and other autocrats for more than two decades, Temelkuran says Americans need to gear up for a “long game” of fighting to rebuild democracy. “It took Erdoğan 15 years to do what Trump did in 100 days,” she said. “If [Americans] do not accept the fact that this is a long game, and it will be brutal, I think you won’t have the patience and stamina to bear it.”

But Temelkuran says she sees a glimmer of hope in recent protests in Turkey, which were sparked by the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, on corruption charges. The charges are widely seen as an attempt to sideline a key rival of Erdoğan ahead of the 2028 presidential elections.

“This is the first time a conventional political party is accommodating or hosting the street protests,” she said. “It was always either the street protests or elections and party politics.”

The combination of the two – something Temelkuran says should have happened years ago – is breathing new life into Turkey’s main opposition party, she said. “These political parties, they’re like shipwrecks: metal structures, they’re dead. Street protests, youth politics come into them like shoaling fish, to turn them into living reefs.”

She said a successful opposition movement in the US would need to bring this same level of energy to the fight. “Many people, especially in America and in Europe, are organizing these fancy panels that normal people never go to. They’re building these NGOs that people are not interested in,” she said. “The only option is to propose a real change … and be absolutely courageous about it.”

Claudia Ortiz (El Salvador), federal deputy with the opposition Vamos party

Claudia Ortiz. Photograph: Irving Rosales

Ortiz says that one important lesson she’s learned since the 2019 election of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele is that she and her party, which had been formed two years prior, need to do more than simply oppose him.

“You cannot make authoritarian leaders the center of your narrative,” said Ortiz. “You have to make the people the center of your narrative, and you have to be passionate about it.”

She said that means doing more to engage with citizens – and being prepared to be surprised by what they say. “A part of the cure for this is listening to people,” she said. “Don’t be so certain about what they want, what they need. You have to ask.”

The election of Bukele and his New Ideas party upended decades of two-party rule between the leftist and conservative parties.

“The parties that ruled the country in the past decades weren’t capable of building a solid democracy that delivered results in the daily life of people,” she said. “But we think that the road to overcoming that is not to destroy institutions, but to make them actually work.”

In the last six years, Bukele, who has famously called himself the “world’s coolest dictator”, has enacted emergency powers, suspending due process, and has appointed loyalists to the judiciary, allowing him to skirt a constitutional amendment against serving a second term.

His mano dura approach to crime has resulted in widespread rights abuses, including forced disappearances and torture; today the country has the world’s highest incarceration rate, according to rights groups.

Many journalists, opposition leaders and rights groups have fled the country.

Despite this, Bukele enjoys consistently high approval ratings, something Ortiz and other analysts attribute to real drops in crime and propaganda. But Ortiz said she believes cracks are starting to show.

Under Bukele, she said, basic services like health and education have gotten worse and costs of living have gone up. “When reality knocks through your door and you don’t have enough food to eat, or you have a relative that’s been a victim of an arbitrary detention … that’s the moment where you say: ‘OK, this is reality, and it’s quite different from the propaganda’,” she said. “I think the honeymoon is passing.”

“Authoritarian systems give the appearance of performing, but their solutions are not thorough, they are not sustainable, and they are not fair,” she went on. “They will decay because the way they function is to exclude, abuse, and allow massive corruption.”

But she says she’s also learned to never underestimate the autocrat.

Whether it’s undermining the judiciary or intimidating local governments, “In many cases, you think, ‘No, they won’t do it,’” she says. “But we have seen how [centralization of power] has advanced very quickly. So it’s important that democracy is defended at every turn,” she said.