La crisis del capitalismo democrático

Three decades ago, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western democratic capitalism seemed to triumph definitively. Today, that system is going through a deep crisis. On the left and right, the voices of those who affirm that capitalism would be better off without democracy, and those who maintain that democracy would be better off without capitalism, proliferate. Liberal democracy is threatened even in the countries of its birth, the United Kingdom and the United States, amid a global populist wave. Authoritarian political models and anti-capitalist economic models continue to gain popularity. Why has this happened? And, above all, what should we do? Martin Wolf reflects on the precarious balance where the capitalism-democracy binomial is based. However necessary this marriage is, inevitable tensions arise between the egalitarian assumptions of democracy and the inegalitarian tendencies of capitalism, and between the globalizing impulse of the market and the national roots of democracy.