The fall of the Soviet Union was not the end of history, as some scholars famously predicted.

Participatory democracy and capitalism have not gone hand in hand to spread Western culture throughout the rest of the world after all.

Many students of democracy now insist, in fact, it's in trouble.

With me in Santa Monica is Bruno Kaufman.

He's in the process of visiting 20 countries on four continents to assess the state of democracy.

He is a political scientist and editor-in-chief of People to Power.

That's a media platform hosted by the Swiss Broadcasting Company.

Welcome to Santa Monica.

Thank you for having me here.

One of the examples people use as the failure of democracy and the challenge to democracies

in Hungary, where they have recently re-elected a president who has done away with important

institutions, the judiciary, the free press in that country, which after having been a Soviet satellite, it was thought, would be part of one of the

new democracies that would lead the world. What happened there?

I mean, Hungary is really in between, you can say, the West and the East. Already on the Soviet

times, Hungary was not the normal East country. It was called the Gulash communist country with a lot of freedoms.

And I, in fact, have visited Hungary and observed the democracy development there for more than 30 years.

And it must be said that even today, it's not black and white.

It's not just taken away the democracy which has existed after a Cold War.

It's in a way this kind of gray zone Hungary has moved for a long, long time. And I'm very

concerned, of course, but I wouldn't say it's just this kind of now democracy has been

taken away. It's still like that, you know, Mr. Orban, the prime minister,

he now, neither in this election he got the majority of the vote, but the system has been

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