Wolfgang Merkel, Director of the research unit "Democracy: Structures, Performance, Challenges" at the Social Science Research Center Berlin, was a guest of N1's One on One programme, where he talked about the dangers of populism and the future of democracy in general.

“(When) I hear this question if democracy, singular, is in crisis, I immediately respond that we cannot talk about the democracy. There are different ones – the Swedish one is not the Croatian one, and the Finnish one is not the US-American one. So, as a comparativist, I immediately argue: let’s look to these different countries, and then you will find unresolved challenges, a term which I prefer instead of crisis,” Merkel said.

However, some issues do exist everywhere.

“There are common challenges. We are living in a globalised world. Some of these common challenges are an increase in inequality across all these countries… Then you have governments who pretend to govern and they even to not have the competence or the power, for example, to tax Google. Google goes to different governments and tells them, if you let us not pay taxes for 5 years then we will set up our headquarters there,” he said. “National governments have lost some of their capacity to steer the economy and impact the society.”

“Then, we have a problem that we… call the heterogeneity of our societies – meaning, there is now a cultural diversity. People are coming from all over the world, having different religions, ethnic backgrounds, and the question is how good are the societies at integrating those people, but also how good are these people at integrating into the societies,” he added, saying that he does not see these challenges being solved in the near future. 

Watch the full interview below: