It was a bad year for the world's autocrats

In 2024, authoritarian leaders around the world faced unexpected setbacks, exposing vulnerabilities in their regimes.

- Juan Forero & Jon Emont

In Syria, rebels raced to Damascus, ending Bashar al-Assad's 24-year-old dictatorship, which few in the outside world thought was in danger of collapse. In August, student protests sent Sheikh Hasina's 15-year reign in Bangladesh crashing down.

Other authoritarian leaders and their governments came under new pressure in 2024, from Nicolás Maduro's iron-fisted regime in Venezuela to the mullahs of Iran to the military junta of Myanmar.

In a world President Biden has cast as split between democracies aligned against a rising tide of autocracy, authoritarians suffered unexpected setbacks in 2024 that exposed their weaknesses, geopolitical analysts and historians said.

"Some positive things happened in terms of autocracies wobbling or, in a couple of places, falling," said Larry Diamond, a Stanford University scholar who has written books on authoritarianism and the challenges facing democracies. "There are a lot of autocracies that are weak or kind of dazed."

Regime change can be exciting on the ground, but it now presents a challenge to new leaders in Bangladesh and Syria to create lasting, inclusive governments, something that has proved difficult elsewhere following political upheavals.

Syrian rebels—whose roots go back to Islamic State and al Qaeda—pledge to respect minorities, but it is unclear whether they have truly shed their hard-line sympathies. Demonstrators fill the streets of Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka. There are allegations of lynchings of people connected to Hasina's political party. And Bangladesh's powerful neighbor, India, is accusing the new government of failing to protect minority Hindus, a charge the Bangladeshi leadership rejects.

"Expectation level is high," said Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Prize-winning Bangladeshi economist who is now the country's interim leader. "Matching this is very difficult."