The populist tide that swept the world over the past decade may finally be receding.
History will record the last two decades as an era of democratic self-harm. Across the globe, voters turned with remarkable regularity to a particular type of leader: the strongman-populist. They spoke the language of grievance, promised easy answers to complex problems, and made a virtue of tearing things down. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán built an “illiberal state.” In the United States, Donald Trump capitalised on the nation’s insecurities linked to immigrants and cultural resentment to ascend to the presidency twice. In Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina governed with an iron fist, suppressing opposition and rigging elections. In India, Narendra Modi weaponised Hindu nationalism. In Pakistan, Imran Khan promised a “naya Pakistan” that never arrived. Further afield, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Turkey each produced their own variants of the type. The pattern was clearly global in nature and not bound to geography, culture, or religion.
Humanity has shown over and over again that it has tremendous capacity to self-correct.
The fuel was a combination of factors, including people who perceived themselves as losers of globalisation, the financial crisis that spared elites while devastating ordinary households, the disorienting pace of cultural change, and a mainstream politics that had stopped listening to the masses. The discontent made fertile ground for the populists. More than a decade later, the results are in – and the world is beginning to render its verdict.
Bangladesh: A Generation Demands Its Country Back
The pushback did not begin in Western capitals. It began in the Global South. Sri Lanka in 2022 saw citizens storm the presidential palace and drive Gotabaya Rajapaksa into exile after years of catastrophic economic mismanagement. Nepal navigated its way toward coalition pluralism. These were early signals. But it was Bangladesh in 2024 that delivered the most resonant verdict.
Sheikh Hasina had governed since 2009, presiding over genuine gains in poverty reduction and economic growth. But the political project morphed over time. Elections lost credibility, opposition leaders were jailed, and civil society was steadily squeezed. These led to the student protests over discriminatory job quotas in the summer of 2024, and the resulting oppression by the government unleashed the fury of a generation that had grown up under one-party, authoritarian rule. Hasina has to flee.
Bangladesh’s youth had absorbed not an education in ideology but in the basic requirements of decent governance. The Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus stepped in to lead an interim government, offering the country a credible, internationally respected face at a critical moment of transition.
Hungary: The Demolition of Orbán
Of all the signals that the populist tide is turning, none has been more dramatic than Hungary on April 12, 2026. Viktor Orbán had spent sixteen years making his country a laboratory for illiberal governance – gerrymandering districts, hollowing out the judiciary, capturing the press, and ranking Hungary as the EU’s most corrupt member state. He had become the global far-right’s most celebrated icon. JD Vance flew to Budapest days before the election to campaign beside him, calling his leadership a model for the continent.
Hungarian voters delivered a different verdict. On a record turnout of nearly eighty per cent – the highest since the fall of communism – Péter Magyar’s pro-European Tisza Party won 138 of 199 parliamentary seats with 53.6 per cent of the vote. Orbán’s Fidesz was reduced to 55 seats and 37.8 per cent. Even the full machinery of incumbency and autocratic rule could not save a government that had run out of things to offer beyond fear. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said simply: “Hungary has chosen Europe.”
The crowds in Budapest chanted “Russians, go home!” The losers in Hungary’s election are not only Orbán and Fidesz. The Kremlin lost its most dependable ally inside the EU. The Trump administration, which had openly backed Orbán, lost its proof-of-concept that illiberal nationalism could entrench itself permanently in a democracy. The message to other populist leaders is uncomfortable: even a carefully engineered political machine, given enough time and enough failure, can be brought down.
The United States: A Reckoning Still in Progress
The American story is still being written. Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 with a genuine electoral mandate. But governing is not campaigning. His approval, which stood above fifty per cent in the early weeks of his second term, has fallen sharply and stands between 36 and 40 per cent.
The most concrete evidence of a shifting mood, however, lies not in polls but in actual votes cast. Since Trump’s election, special elections and off-cycle contests across the country have produced a Democratic overperformance averaging close to fifteen percentage points relative to the 2024 baseline – a shift that has translated into the Democrats flipping more than thirty seats.
What makes this shift analytically striking is a paradox: the Democratic Party itself remains deeply unpopular. Polling consistently shows the party’s favorability near historic lows. Voters are not rushing to embrace the Democrats. They are recoiling from Trump. The electoral shift is not an endorsement of the left – it is a rejection of cheap populism. That distinction matters enormously, because it means the correction underway is not partisan but something deeper: a broad public judgment that the style of governance Trump represents has failed to deliver on its promises. The midterms of November 2026 will be the definitive test of whether that judgment holds at scale.
A Pattern Becomes a Tide
The pattern extends further. In the United Kingdom, Labour’s landslide in July 2024 ended fourteen years of Conservative rule and delivered one of the largest parliamentary majorities in modern British history.
In Turkey, Erdo?an’s approval fell below forty per cent following his party’s worst local election defeat in its history. Even in Russia, beneath the armour of authoritarian control, Putin’s official approval has fallen to its lowest level since before the Ukraine invasion, and his unprompted trust rating has collapsed from 71 per cent in 2015 to under 30 per cent today – what one analyst called “a snowball beginning to melt.”
What has changed is something subtler than any single election result: populism has lost its shine. Populism was fueled by the hope that disruption might produce results that conventional politics could not. That hope has run into experience. Hungary became the EU’s most corrupt state. Bangladesh became a country where young people could not freely speak or vote. America’s working class found that tariffs raised their cost of living. The gap between populist promise and populist performance has become too wide to be palatable to the masses.
The Tide Turns
The arc of history does not bend automatically toward good governance. It bends when “we the people” decide to do so. We are, perhaps, at such a moment where there is a genuine shift in the global mood. The decade-long experiment with demagogic populism has run long enough to produce a verdict. In Colombo, in Dhaka, and now in Budapest, citizens have delivered that verdict through the ballots.
The world does not return to sanity through leaders alone. It returns through the accumulated decisions of millions of ordinary people who conclude that enough is enough -that they deserve better. When that conclusion reaches critical mass, even the most carefully engineered political machine proves unable to hold. Budapest, Dhaka, and Kathmandu have all shown that. Canada has overwhelmingly voted for change. The question now is which capital speaks next.
Humanity has shown over and over again that it has tremendous capacity to self-correct. Admittedly, the damage that has been done by the populist leaders will take time to reverse. Patience and persistence will be the key, but I am convinced that we are at the cusp of a new wave of regionalism, globalism, and humanitarianism.
The writer is a freelance columnist.