The Axis of Illiberalism (2026) — Part 2

Russia, Israel, Hungary and America - International Alignment Without Alliance

Photo by Donald Teel on Unsplash

In the first article in this series, liberal democracy was described as a demanding system of restraint. Power is authorised through elections, but constrained through law, rights, institutions, and norms that deliberately frustrate domination. Illiberalism begins where those constraints are treated not as safeguards, but as obstacles.

What follows is not the story of democracy collapsing all at once, but of restraint being removed piece by piece. Nor is it the story of a single regime or coherent ideology. Instead, a recognisable pattern has emerged across different states, political systems, and centres of power. Elections remain. Legal forms persist. Democratic language survives. What changes is function.

This is the Axis of Illiberalism.

The term makes people uneasy, and understandably so. It carries historical weight and invites accusations of exaggeration or paranoia. But an axis does not require a treaty, a shared manifesto, or central command. It describes alignment in outcome. It names a convergence among actors who differ in interest and identity but arrive at the same practical conclusion: that liberal constraints on power can be violated with diminishing cost.

This alignment is neither accidental nor centrally orchestrated. It emerges through selection. Tactics that succeed are copied. Violations that go unpunished become precedents. Systems adapt to reward those willing to abandon restraint and disadvantage those who insist on it. Over time, convergence appears not because actors agree, but because incentives align.

Russia illustrates this sequence clearly. Its domestic transformation preceded its international aggression. When Vladimir Putin came to power, Russia still retained the outward forms of a post-Soviet democracy. Elections were competitive. Media pluralism existed. Parliament was unruly. None of these survived intact.

Independent television networks were taken over by state-aligned corporations after critical reporting on the Chechen wars. Journalists who continued to investigate state violence or corruption were harassed, exiled, or killed.

Elections continued, but competition was neutralised through legal thresholds, media exclusion, and administrative pressure. Courts remained, but were repurposed as instruments of executive will. After mass protests against electoral fraud in 2011 and 2012, dissent was criminalised in stages. Protest laws were tightened. NGOs were labelled “foreign agents,” a term chosen less to regulate funding than to signal treachery. The definition of extremism expanded to include ordinary political opposition.

The treatment of Alexei Navalny demonstrated how democratic form could be preserved while substance disappeared. Prosecuted on charges widely regarded as politically motivated, barred from office, poisoned with a nerve agent, imprisoned on return, and ultimately dead in custody. Navalny was eliminated without formally banning opposition itself. His organisations were designated extremist, criminalising association rather than argument.

By the time Russia invaded Ukraine, democratic hollowing was complete. There was no free press capable of challenging the war narrative, no court able to restrain executive action, no opposition movement able to mobilise legally. New laws criminalised describing the invasion as a war. Thousands were detained for anti-war protest.

The invasion was not a deviation from Russia’s political trajectory. It was its extension. Borders became as negotiable as courts had been. International law was violated openly. Civilian infrastructure was targeted. Children were deported. International institutions responded with condemnations, sanctions, and arrest warrants. Russia ignored them and absorbed the costs.

The lesson was not lost on others. A state that eliminated internal accountability could violate the most fundamental rules of the international order and survive.

Hungary demonstrates how the same logic operates from inside a liberal system. When Viktor Orbán returned to power in 2010 with a parliamentary supermajority, he moved rapidly to entrench structural advantage. The constitution was rewritten. The Constitutional Court’s powers were curtailed. Loyalists were installed in regulatory and judicial posts with mandates extending far beyond electoral cycles. Electoral rules were redesigned to favour the governing party.

Media pluralism was neutralised without extensive formal censorship. Public broadcasting was captured. Private outlets were acquired by Orbán-aligned business figures and consolidated into a pro-government media foundations. Independent journalism survived in a diminished form, but it is economically fragile and politically exposed.

Civil society and academia followed. NGOs receiving foreign funding were stigmatised as threats to sovereignty. The Central European University was forced to relocate most of its operations after legal changes made normal functioning impossible.

Only once the domestic system was secured did Hungary begin openly defying EU rule-of-law standards. Court rulings were delayed or ignored. Financial penalties were treated as political bargaining chips. Unanimity rules were weaponised to block collective action.

Hungary showed that a state could hollow out liberal democracy legally, remain inside the European Union, and use membership itself as leverage. It became a spoiler not through accident, but by design.

Israel represents a different configuration of illiberalism, one organised around nationality and ethnicity rather than electoral erosion. Israel does not recognise a civic nationality shared equally by all citizens. Citizenship exists, but nationality is registered separately. Jewish nationality is legally privileged but “Israeli nationality” is not. Palestinian citizens of Israel are citizens, but they are not appropriately recognised as a national collective within the state.

This distinction is not symbolic. Nationality carries collective rights. Land allocation, settlement policy, and national self-determination are organised around Jewish nationality and ethnicity rather than equal citizenship. The 2018 Nation-State Law constitutionalised this hierarchy, declaring that the right to national self-determination is exclusive to the Jewish people. Equality is notably absent from the law’s text.

Inside Israel proper, this structure produces systematic disparities. Housing and land policy prioritise Jewish communities. Palestinian citizens face chronic barriers to building permits and municipal expansion. Education funding and infrastructure investment are unequal. Security policy treats Palestinian political activity as a permanent risk to be managed rather than democratic participation to be represented.

In the occupied territories, the logic is explicit. Two populations live under the same sovereign authority and are governed by different legal systems. Israeli settlers are subject to civil law. Palestinians are governed by military law, tried in military courts, and regulated through permits that control movement, land use, family life, and political activity.

Judicial independence therefore represents one of the few remaining internal constraints. Netanyahu’s attempts to subordinate the courts were not merely populist gestures. They were structurally necessary to remove obstacles to settlement expansion and permanent rule without equality. When mass protest delayed these reforms, the project was recalibrated rather than abandoned.

International response has been selective. Criticism exists, but enforcement remains pathetic. Democracy is shown once again to coexist with entrenched inequality, and accountability proves negotiable when framed as security.

The United States tests the core of the system. Donald Trump did not abolish elections. He attempted to make them conditional. Courts, election officials, and even the peaceful transfer of power were treated as legitimate only when they produced the desired outcome. The pressure campaign following the 2020 election and the events of January 6th marked an unprecedented assault on democratic norms in a mature liberal democracy.

Institutional resistance held, but the lesson endured. A sitting president could challenge electoral legitimacy openly, attack judicial authority, and mobilise mass distrust without being removed by the system itself. Trumpism evolved from improvisation into design. Project 2025 represents the codification of norm-breaking into blueprint: purging the civil service, consolidating executive power, and neutralising internal checks in advance. This was Trump using the Orban playbook.

For observers elsewhere, this mattered profoundly. If the central guarantor of liberal order treats democracy as conditional, restraint everywhere looks optional.

This convergence is reinforced through transnational networks that are increasingly explicit. The National Conservatism conference circuit brings together Trump-aligned Republicans, Brexit advocates, Orbán’s allies, Israeli nationalists, European far-right parties, and sympathetic donors and intellectuals. These gatherings do not issue joint instructions. They normalise shared frames: sovereignty as exemption, courts as enemies, liberalism as decadence.

Alongside these networks circulate a set of conspiratorial narratives that perform an important political function. Claims about “Soros,” “globalists,” or “Cultural Marxism” are not coherent theories. They are simplifications and conspiracies that personalise structural conflict and redirect anger away from concentrations of power and toward those who defend liberal constraint. Their vagueness is their strength. “Soros” becomes a stand-in for independent institutions, human rights law, multilateral oversight, and pluralist politics. “Cultural Marxism” collapses feminism, anti-racism, LGBTQ rights, and academic critique into a single imagined enemy.

These narratives travel easily across borders because they allow actors with otherwise incompatible nationalisms to recognise a common adversary. This is why figures who deploy antisemitic tropes can form close alliances with explicitly Jewish nationalist leaders. Viktor Orbán’s campaigns have repeatedly drawn on antisemitic imagery, even as he maintains warm relations with Benjamin Netanyahu. The relationship is not contradictory. It is instructive.

What binds these actors is not ethnic or religious consistency, but hostility to liberal, socialist, and multilateral forms of restraint. Nationalism is instrumental rather than principled. It mobilises domestic support, but does not define permanent enmity. Rival nationalisms are tolerated because they are secondary. The real enemy is the architecture of constraint itself.

Money follows the same logic. American donors fund illiberal movements across Europe, including in the UK. Russian funds have flowed to sympathetic politicians and parties to fracture trust and weaken enforcement. Tactics migrate. Red lines are tested. Coordination occurs without central command.

Each part of this axis illustrates a different aspect of illberalism. Russia demonstrates that borders can be changed by force. Hungary demonstrates that institutions can be hollowed out legally from within. Israel demonstrates that democracy can coexist with permanent apartheid. The United States demonstrates that even mature democracies can be pushed to the brink without formal collapse.

Each lowers the cost of norm-breaking for the others. This is how mutual permission operates. Not by conspiracy but through example.

Neoliberalism prepared the ground by concentrating power while insulating it from democratic interference. As inequality widened and legitimacy eroded, persuasion stopped being sufficient. Illiberalism emerged not as a revolt against elite power, but as its adaptation. Where neoliberalism stacked the game, illiberalism rigs it.

Democracy rarely ends in a single moment. Restraint is redefined as optional, then unreasonable, then dangerous. What emerges is not chaos, but a different order, one in which democracy survives as a symbol while its defences are systematically removed.

The next articles in this series turn from alignment to design, from emergence to intention, and from abstraction to practice. The question is no longer whether these actors agree. It is whether they are making the same future more likely.

They are.