Democracy is in danger all over the world. Brazil is just the latest example.

Democracy, as we have found in the past few years, can be a fragile thing.

That 's not to say that reactions have been started by governments or governments. The truth is both less dramatic and more insidious than that. No, it's that reactionaries have started winning power themselves as the leaders of popularly elected governments. Democracies, in other words, are electing people who are not really democrats. At least not in the small-D sense of the word by being a free press, an independent judiciary and minority rights.

And sometimes it's an ill-timed recession or corruption scandal for this to happen. Just ask Brazil, which is still reeling from both, as a result, elected the ounce-fringe, far-right figure Jair Bolsanaro as its next president.

It's actually a pretty simple story. Brazil's economy has been a fairly standard emerging-markets crisis. It started in the early 2000s when the global commodity boom was booming so much that it was more likely to be borrowed, and foreign money came into play to get a piece of the pie. This was good while it lasted, but the problem is that it was not last.

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By 2014, all this had gone into reverse: Commodities had collapsed, consumers had slowed down their borrowing, and, in part because of the end of the US Federal Reserve's quantitative easing program, which had gone to Brazil in search of higher returns. returned to the United States.

The good news, insofar as it's been, Brazil's central bank is getting enough money to keep its currency day fund to cover all that. It did not matter how much it was necessary to save money.

This came at a cost, though. It always does. Higher interest rates hit Brazil when its economy is already faltering because of the effects of lower prices and feels it in a deep recession. In fact, it was the worst one on record, going all the way back to the 1930s. Brazil's unemployment rate jumps from a little more than 6 percent in 2014 to a little less than 14 percent in 2017.

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In normal times, this kind of economic failure would just be a political one for the party in power. It would lose the next election to its rival hand. But these were not normal times. A pervasive corruption scandal at the state-owned oil company implicated not only the center-left Workers Party, but also the center-right Democratic Movement Party. That meant that it was time to go back to the end of the day – and with a vigor that was not necessarily compatible with democratic niceties.

That's how Bolsonaro – who praised Brazil's former military dictatorship, Dilma Rousseff to the colonel who had tortured her, spoke to a woman , said it would be better to be dead than gay and denigrated the country's minority – managed to win a majority in the second round of presidential voting.

The same sort of thing happened in Hungary. Various corruption scandals took down its mainstream right-wing parties, then the financial crisis took down its mainstream left-wing one. At that point, Viktor Orban's Fidesz was able to win the vote. The result is that Hungary is now a multiparty democracy and more a one-party state.

It's a reminder that even if it's never going to be "end" – in the sense that liberal democracy is ascending – that it's always just a few bad decisions and few bad quarters of GDP growth from coming back.