What comes to mind when you hear the word “democracy”? Most people would mention elections. Elections are important for democracy, but they alone do not create it. Schmitter and Karl refer to this idea as “electoralism.” This is the mistaken belief that just having elections is enough for democracy to exist. Benin, once known as the most stable democracy in West Africa, has fallen into this trap. Elections still take place. Institutions still keep their names. However, the essence of democracy— accountability, real competition, and civil liberties— has been quietly taken apart. In the past, Benin has been regarded as an evidence where peaceful transfers of power were possible in Africa, a model worth emulating. However, today it is considered to be a case what some describe as a “constitutional coup,” in which democracy is weakened not by military force, but through legal processes. This decline reflects a much larger trend. As of 2021, the average citizen around the world experiences a level of democracy that has dropped back to 1989 levels. More countries are becoming autocratic now than ever before.

For about thirty years after the National Conference of 1990, Benin was seen as the hope of democracy in West Africa. The country was characterized by multiparty elections, press freedom, and the rule of law. However, since 2016, things changed, and Benin began to experience a retreat in its democratic progress. This is not a unique situation. Political scientists Anna Lührmann and Staffan Lindberg have called it “the third wave of autocratization.” This refers to a global trend where democracy declines not through military coups but through the gradual, legal actions of elected leaders. Unlike the sudden coups in neighboring Mali or Guinea, Benin exemplifies this more subtle pattern. This makes the regression difficult to see and even harder to stop. A once-stable republic now faces the same poor governance and human rights abuses that have spread across the continent.

President Patrice Talon, known in the private sector as the “Cotton King,” has approached governance with the calculated mindset of a business executive. His plan focuses on removing political competition through specific legal tools. The main tool has been the Court for the Repression of Economic Crimes and Terrorism, known by its French acronym CRIET. Created to fight corruption, CRIET has turned into a way to abuse the law, used to detain prominent opposition figures like Reckya Madougou without due process. Legal scholar Ozan Varol calls this strategy “stealth authoritarianism,” where legal mechanisms are used to consolidate power in ways that outsiders find hard to detect or challenge. This is what makes Talon’s approach so effective. Compared to the conditions for a functioning democracy that Schmitter and Karl outlined, fair elections free from coercion, freedom of political expression, and the right to form independent political groups, Benin has systematically violated each condition. In 2019, an electoral law was introduced that disqualified all opposition parties, turning parliament into a body that merely endorses the government’s authority. The rules were not violated; they were rewritten by the very leader they were supposed to restrict. And because the process looked legal, it was. That is precisely what makes stealth authoritarianism so difficult to challenge. When the law itself becomes the instrument of democratic erosion, there is no obvious violation to point to, no clear moment to condemn.

Benin’s decline supports the view that democratic backsliding in Africa is often driven more by the quality of leadership than by the type of government. The issue is not democracy itself but weak leadership that allows dictators to rise. African nations that democratized early, before strong economic and institutional foundations were established, developed systems that are vulnerable to this kind of takeover. When the necessary structures to move from personal to institutional power are absent, leaders can easily manipulate the system to serve their interests. This is what real autocratization looks like: slow, gradual, and entirely within the law, one of several alternative patterns to electoral autocracy that have emerged across contemporary democracies.

The public’s response shows a clear gap between what citizens want and what the government provides. Research by Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk on democratic decline indicates that in wealthy democracies, younger generations are becoming more indifferent to democracy, increasingly open to authoritarian alternatives and less likely to view free elections as crucial. Their data also reveals a different trend in sub-Saharan Africa, where young citizens often hold stronger pro-democratic values. This is what makes the situation in Benin particularly painful. The demand for real democracy exists, but the supply does not. When the opposition was banned in 2019, citizens in Cotonou protested. The government responded with violent crackdowns, a stark contrast to Benin’s history of peaceful political transitions. Since then, many voters have chosen to boycott elections completely. This is not due to apathy but because they recognize that voting has become a mere formality rather than a real choice. In Foa and Mounk’s terms, this represents a crisis of “regime legitimacy” not dissatisfaction with a specific government but a loss of faith in the system itself. In Benin, this crisis was not created by citizens losing hope; it was engineered by a leader who made the system untrustworthy. In this sense, the boycott is itself a political act. Silence as the only remaining language of dissent when every formal channel of opposition has been closed off.

Benin’s crisis reminds us that democracy is not a final goal but a system that needs constant upkeep. Schmitter and Karl warned that the most dangerous time in any democracy arises when leaders start to manipulate procedures, when the rules of the game serve power instead of limiting it. Benin moved through that dangerous moment quietly, without tanks or emergencies. This “quiet coup” uses the law as its cover, making it hard to detect the damage before the international community can respond or even notice. Foa and Mounk remind us that democracy doesn’t fall apart all at once; instead, it slowly drifts apart. But if that drift isn’t stopped, it makes collapse more likely. To move forward, we need to move from personalized power to institutional power by creating systems where the state’s rules last longer than the goals of any one businessman or politician. Benin’s decline is not just a warning for Africa. It serves as a warning for any democracy that confuses the act of holding elections with real accountability. If a model democracy can fall this quietly, no democracy can afford to take itself for granted.