How can we defend our democracies against those who would destroy them? We talk a lot about strategies for keeping anti-liberal, nationalist populists out of power, but Donald Trump’s daily wielding of a wrecking ball shows that it’s equally important to reinforce your democracy so it can withstand a period of populists in power.

Germany has a concept called wehrhafte Demokratie, often weirdly translated as “militant democracy” but actually meaning a democracy capable of defending itself. Under this motto, some in Germany are proposing to ban Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), now one of the most popular parties in the country. That’s the wrong way to go. It would only reinforce the far-right party’s supporters in their conviction that the democratic state itself is a kind of liberal elitist conspiracy, and impart to the AfD the nimbus of martyrdom. The French experiment of a “republican arc”, in which virtually all the other parties agree only on keeping out Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, is also visibly backfiring. Such a wide range of parties unsurprisingly fails to agree on urgently needed reforms and the National Rally can go on criticising from the sidelines. So it’s worth contemplating the example of the Netherlands, where the party of the inflammatory populist Geert Wilders was allowed into power in a coalition government, failed to deliver, brought that government down by withdrawing from the coalition, and lost the subsequent election (albeit only narrowly) to a liberal party led by the young, dynamic Rob Jetten.

But if you’re going to take the risk of letting populists into government, you need first to reinforce the defences of your democracy – otherwise they will use democracy to dismantle democracy, as Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary and Trump is trying to do in the US. Salami slice by salami slice, these once liberal democracies become what political scientists call an electoral authoritarian system. There are still........

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