{I} n the second half of the past decade, a new political bogeyman appeared on the global scene: the illiberal democrat. The beau ideal of illiberal democracy is, of course, Viktor Orbán of Hungary, who outlined the term in a 2014 speech. “The Hungarian nation is not a simple sum of individuals,” he said, “but a community that needs to be organized, strengthened, and developed, and in this sense, the new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.”

It sounded ominous, but Orbán went on to explain that he intended to limit not the political freedom of Hungarians but the ability of foreigners to direct NGOs that are lobbying the Hungarian state. He also wanted to provide the Hungarian state adequate resources to negotiate with the EU, recognizing that politics is still a contest for power and not just happy cooperation. Still, the term “illiberal democrat” caught on and was applied, well, liberally to leaders such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, the Law and Justice party in Poland, and even retrospectively to Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. The charge was that they would use a popular and populist agenda to erode fundamental liberties. The franchise would be withdrawn, the press suppressed, civil society crushed, and opposition to the government increasingly criminalized.

This charge has proven basically false. Everyone but Orbán has been cashiered in subsequent elections. But illiberalism has new proponents in 2024: liberals themselves.

Look no further than the competition between Brussels and Hungary. Earlier this week, a document was leaked outlining a drastic and shockingly detailed plan to collapse the Hungarian economy if Orbán does not relent and support the EU’s agenda in Ukraine. Orbán wants the war to end — and he had never wanted it to begin — because his country is so dependent on Russian energy supplies, and he cannot un-landlock Hungary to get in on more, American liquified natural gas. Hungary has been wracked by energy inflation since the EU tore up its contracts with Russia. The whole point of the EU was to enhance the power of European nation-states by providing them a mechanism for voluntary cooperation, but Brussels sees itself as in judgment of elected governments.

That’s not all. Law and Justice in Poland saw its turn in government end in the most normal circumstances possible. After two terms, the party had worn out its welcome and accumulated a number of scandals. Its chief rival, Civic Platform, narrowly won in the elections last year. But nothing is proceeding as normal because the new liberal government is behaving as if the last eight years have been entirely an aberration, to be annulled by decree rather than reformed by law. The new government is arresting former Law and Justice MPs — even raiding the president’s mansion to do so.

While Poland’s massive state-media system has been a political spoil for election winners, Law and Justice tried to preserve a toehold by legally transferring the system’s governance to a new body that was more insulated from parliamentary interference. The new government just shut off the broadcasters and declared them bankrupt until they could secure new funding and a mechanism for new governance. Even Poland’s Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, no friend of Law and Justice, has raised doubts about the legality of the new government’s smash-and-grab style of reform and recapture.

In Germany, the policies of the mainstream parties keep driving up the popularity of the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which is critical of the state’s attitude toward immigration. The government’s response has been boldly illiberal. Last month it passed a law that could extend the franchise to more than 1 million Turks living in Germany as guest workers. Somewhat hilariously, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has taken steps to encourage these Turks to organize a pro-Erdoğan German party. Meanwhile, the political class has been in a monthslong agony about whether to simply ban AfD, the second-most-popular political party in the country.

A common notion in 2024 is the idea that the populists must be defeated in order to adequately support Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia, which itself is taken as a proxy for the battle between liberalism and illiberalism. Orbán, AfD, and Trump want to see the war end soon, implying that something less than a comprehensive defeat of Russia may be acceptable to them. But that only makes this common thesis more provocative. It suggests that 2024 will be the year when Western politics is Ukrainized and when we might consider adopting Ukraine’s illiberal methods for defending liberalism: banning political parties, shutting down opposition media, altering the electorate on whims.

That brings us to the United States. What will American liberals do? Perhaps they’ll try to use bizarre and novel legal theories in a campaign of lawfare on the opposition, the way Poland does. Maybe secretaries of state will come up with theories to simply exclude the opposition from the ballot, the way Germany is contemplating doing.

The precedents established this year will tell us whether illiberal liberalism is a mere short-term overreach by political elites or the dawn of a new era of politics.