One of the world’s most read authors and historians, Anne Applebaum spoke in the Delphi Economic Forum last April with Ta Nea’s Michalis Mitsos, on a critical question of our time: Why do people who live in democracies find authoritarianism appealing?
Drawing inspiration from her newly published book “Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World”, Applebaum explains how autocratic figures like Russia’s President Vladimir Putin sell the image of a supporter of traditional values and position themselves as “deniers” of Western values. For Applebaum, the conclusion is clear: in an era of radical change like today, the need for a strongman arises. And to counter that, we must devine a kind of “tough liberalism”, which is not naive about the realities of our time and the extent of foreign influence in our democracies.