I know but in more recent years/decades when Did Orban, Law and Justice, Chavez, Erdogan and Duterte began acting like strongmen
I'd say they were always strongmen at heart, cause you know, "power doesn't corrupt, power reveals" and all that. I mean yeah, Chavez wasn't as autocratic as his succesor, but he did attempted a military coup in 1992, the disregard for democracy was there from the begining. The countries' backsliding under those leaders began as soon as they got to power.
The system in Venezuela before Chavez was incredibly undemocratic, with massive counts of oppression of smaller movements acting on behalf of the poorer and more mestizo population. The 1999 constitution and its revisions under Chavez opened up the country by allowing more voices to be heard and greater diversity of people to actually govern themselves.
Where this goes haywire is that the Bolivarian revolution was not completed. Chavez, the social democrat he was, would not crack down on the oligarchy and instead worked along side them while boosting the Army’s standing to replace the large plantation owners. Come 2014, well the plantation owners used the awful corruption and rule of the Army and industrial sector’s bosses and owners to get the middle class professionals to their side.
Venezuela should be the shining example of how, even buttressed and fortified it is, the limitations of social democracy—modification and usage of appeasement concessions to “perfect capitalism”— and colluding with a faction of the elites using their own game is a fools errand. Only through the creation of true democracy through the dismantling of capitalism entirely can people be free.
I can’t say this enough, but the reason why Maduro isn’t coup’d is because he has empowered the Army and the industrial sector, along with corrupted collectives, to run people over and dismantle the Bolivarian revolution—calling actual social ownership as a goal a pipe dream and the methods to get their as “authoritarian”. It’s why the Left has its own electoral coalition.
