On 5 April 1992, Peru's elected president, Alberto Fujimori, appeared on television and announced that he was dissolving Congress and reorganizing the courts. Tanks surrounded the legislature. Peruvians used a word for it, autogolpe, a self-coup: a seizure of power by a leader already in office. Fujimori's move was dramatic, but it also marked a turning point. Since the end of the Cold War, democracies have more often been worn down from inside, step by step, than toppled in a single night.

From coups to erosion

During the Cold War, the classic way a democracy died was a military coup: soldiers seized the palace, suspended the constitution and ruled. Chile in 1973 and Turkey in 1980 are examples. In an influential 2016 article, "On Democratic Backsliding," the political scientist Nancy Bermeo showed that the most blatant forms had become rarer. Open-ended military coups, executive coups like Fujimori's, and election-day ballot fraud had all declined. What grew instead were subtler forms. Bermeo highlighted three: promissory coups, in which plotters claim they are saving democracy and promise quick elections; executive aggrandizement; and strategic manipulation of elections well before voting day. By that last phrase she meant tactics such as keeping opposition candidates off the ballot, limiting their access to media, packing election commissions and rewriting rules, all done long before polling day so that the vote itself can look clean to observers.

Executive aggrandizement

Bermeo described executive aggrandizement as elected leaders weakening checks on their power one institution at a time, often through legal channels. No single step looks like the end of democracy. A court is enlarged, a broadcaster's license expires, a law on foreign funding passes, an election commission gets new members. Each move comes with a justification, and each may be defensible on its own. The danger lies in the pattern and the destination. Because the process unfolds through elections and parliaments, its leaders can always say they have a mandate. Its defenders see it as voters taking back institutions from unelected elites.

Names for the same worry

Legal scholars have coined their own terms. Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq distinguished authoritarian reversion, a rapid collapse such as a coup, from constitutional retrogression, a slow decay of electoral competition, rights of speech and association, and the rule of law. David Landau wrote of abusive constitutionalism: using the tools of constitutional change, such as amendments and new constitutions, to make a regime less democratic. Kim Lane Scheppele called the pattern autocratic legalism, in which leaders use electoral mandates to pass laws that entrench them while keeping a surface of legality. The common thread is that law itself becomes the instrument, which makes the change harder for citizens and foreign observers to recognize.

Why gradual erosion works

Gradual erosion has several advantages for would-be autocrats. Above all, it never offers one clear moment around which opponents can rally, and there is never one obvious line to defend. It keeps foreign aid and trade flowing, because outsiders hesitate to sanction an elected government. It divides opponents, since some will judge each step reasonable. And it can be reversed only by winning elections under rules that have been bent. Researchers call the endpoint a "tilted playing field": elections still happen, but the incumbent controls the referees, the money and the microphone.

None of this means every expansion of executive power is backsliding. Governments sometimes need emergency powers; courts sometimes deserve reform; election rules change in every democracy. The test scholars propose is cumulative and comparative: does the change make it harder for the current rulers to lose? Is it applied evenly? Would its defenders accept it if their opponents held power?

Worked example

Return to Peru. Fujimori, an agronomist and political outsider, won the 1990 election against the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. He inherited hyperinflation and the brutal insurgency of the Shining Path. Congress, controlled by his opponents, resisted his decrees. In April 1992 he dissolved it with the army's backing, and polls showed that most Peruvians approved. The capture of Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán that September added to his popularity.

Under international pressure, Fujimori called elections for a new constituent congress, and a new constitution allowing immediate reelection narrowly passed a referendum in 1993. He won again in 1995. Behind the scenes, his intelligence adviser Vladimiro Montesinos bribed judges, legislators and television owners, recording many payments on video. When one such video was broadcast in 2000, the regime collapsed. Fujimori fled to Japan and resigned by fax. He was later extradited, convicted in 2009 for human rights abuses including death squad killings, and died in 2024.

Peru shows both models at once. The 1992 self-coup was an old-style rupture, visible to all. But the regime that followed survived for eight years through the newer methods: a constitution rewritten to permit reelection, captured media and courts, and elections held on a tilted field. Notice also the popular support. Backsliding often begins with real grievances, and leaders who erode democracy can be genuinely popular while doing it.