Geneva Democracy Week 2025 began on 6 October with a timely and pressing question: Can democracy survive polarization? The opening session brought together Marie-Laure Salles, Director of the Geneva Graduate Institute, Anne Hiltpold, Vice-President of the Geneva State Council, and George Papandreou, former Prime Minister of Greece and General Rapporteur on Democracy at the Council of Europe, for an evening of reflection on the future of democratic life.

Marie-Laure Salles opened with a stark overview of democratic decline. Drawing on recent data from the Varieties of Democracy Institute, she noted that the number of liberal democracies has dropped from 45 in 2009 to only 29 today. For the first time in twenty years, autocracies outnumber democracies, and only 12 percent of the world’s population now lives under liberal democratic regimes. Prof. Salles warned that this erosion has been gradual rather than sudden, rooted in long-term structural shifts: the weakening of trust in democratic legitimacy, rising inequality, and the spread of social fragmentation. Polarization, she argued, both reflects and reinforces these trends, creating a feedback loop in which democratic fragility deepens division, and division further undermines democracy. She closed by calling for “political imagination, courageous leadership, and collective mobilization” to rebuild confidence in democratic life.
Anne Hiltpold followed with remarks on Geneva’s civic role. She underlined education’s central importance in nurturing pluralism and responsibility, noting that schools must prepare citizens to engage critically and respectfully with others. For her, polarization cannot be tackled by institutions alone; it demands a renewal of civic participation from the ground up, beginning with everyday spaces of learning and exchange.

The keynote address by George Papandreou was a sweeping reflection on democracy’s philosophical roots, present dangers, and future possibilities. He began by recalling that democracy was born “the moment humanity chose dialogue over domination, words instead of weapons.” Democracy, he argued, emerged as a moral innovation, a system to transform anger into argument and conflict into dialogue.
Mr Papandreou linked this ancient lesson to what he called “democratic security”: the ability of societies to manage disagreement through empathy, fairness, and collective reasoning. Today’s question, he suggested, is not whether democracy can survive polarization, but whether democracies can still do what they were designed to do - turn division into dialogue and conflict into consensus. The crisis, in his view, is not disagreement itself but the loss of the means to disagree constructively.

Moving from philosophy to political economy, Mr Papandreou described how extreme inequality and the concentration of wealth have hollowed out justice and democracy alike. Echoing Aristotle, he warned that when citizens feel excluded from prosperity and humiliated by impunity, they turn to demagogues promising revenge and order. Authoritarianism, he said, is not the cause of democracy’s decline but its consequence. Globalized capitalism, in which “wealth and data move freely but accountability does not,” has created new forms of oligarchic domination. The richest one percent, he added, own more than the bottom ninety percent combined and are responsible for a disproportionate share of carbon emissions.

Mr Papandreou then turned to the digital sphere, warning that “our public space has been colonized by social media platforms.” Algorithms, designed to profit from attention, reward outrage over understanding and turn citizens into data points. The “tyranny of optimization,” as he called it, corrodes truth and empathy alike. Democracy, he insisted, cannot survive in a world where public debate is ruled by opaque commercial logics.

He called this moment “an age of insecurity,” marked by ecological collapse, technological disruption, and the return of war. Insecurity, he argued, can lead either toward authoritarianism-offering “the illusion of strength in exchange for freedom”-or toward renewal, through solidarity, fairness, and participation. “When people feel seen, heard, and empowered,” he said, “fear loses its power.”
Mr Papandreou concluded with a call for “radical democracy”, i.e. not extremism, but a return to democracy’s roots. This means dispersing power, expanding deliberation, and embedding citizen participation into the fabric of governance. He proposed new “digital agoras” and citizens’ assemblies as a fourth branch of government, giving people a continuous voice in shaping decisions. Democracy must also extend into economic and technological life, through worker cooperatives, fair taxation, and public oversight of digital infrastructure. Drawing inspiration from Switzerland’s own model of consensus and civic engagement, he closed with a reminder that democracy is not a mechanism of majority rule but “a living organism of mutual trust,” sustained by courage, empathy, and imagination.