The Democracy Perception Index 2026 is a global survey covering over ninety percent of the world’s population. It has produced results that confound nearly every assumption underlying the Western foreign-policy consensus. The United States, self-declared champion of the rules-based international order, now ranks among the most negatively perceived countries on earth. When the world is asked to choose sides in active geopolitical conflicts, it sides against Washington again and again – overwhelmingly with Palestine over Israel, and almost unanimously against American military bases on foreign soil. China is seen more favorably than the United States across most of the planet. And none of this, the study finds, reflects a turn against democracy itself – support for democratic governance remains strong globally. What the world is turning against is the behavior of the states that claim to lead it.
There is a moment in the history of empires when the internal logic of power becomes visible to everyone except those exercising it. That moment, documented with clinical precision in the ninth edition of the Democracy Perception Index (DPI), published in the spring of 2026 by Nira Data in collaboration with the Alliance of Democracies Foundation, has now arrived for the United States and its closest allies. The study – the largest annual survey of its kind, drawing on nationally representative interviews with more than 94,000 respondents across 98 countries representing over ninety percent of the global population – was designed, one suspects, to demonstrate the enduring appeal of the democratic model promoted from Washington and Brussels. What it demonstrates instead is a historic collapse of American prestige, a profound disenchantment with Western-led institutions, and a global public opinion that has quietly but unmistakably reordered its moral loyalties. The United States now ranks among the five most negatively perceived countries on earth, alongside North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran – and Israel, its closest military client. It loses three of the five geopolitical conflicts the survey puts to the world’s citizens. In 86 of 97 countries, majorities oppose hosting American military bases. For the first time in the survey’s history, the United States is seen slightly more negatively than Russia. China, meanwhile, is viewed more favorably than the United States in 63 of 83 surveyed countries, including across most of Europe.
The Alliance of Democracies Foundation, which co-publishes this index, was founded by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former NATO Secretary General and Danish Prime Minister, and exists explicitly to advance Western-style liberal democracy. Nira Data, the Danish firm that conducts the research, describes its mission as giving voice to the global public in service of democratic values. This is not a study produced by critics of the West. It is a study produced by its institutional advocates, and that fact lends the findings a peculiar authority: they arrive not as a verdict from outside but as an involuntary confession from within. Rasmussen’s own foreword acknowledges the data while reaching, almost desperately, for an explanation that absolves Western policy – blaming “threats” that Europeans are not perceiving clearly enough, urging democratic leaders to offer “a vision of optimism and hope.” What the study’s authors cannot bring themselves to say plainly, the numbers say for them: the world does not trust the West, and the reasons are not a mystery.
Unlike conventional democracy indices that rely on expert assessments of laws and institutions, the DPI asks citizens directly how they experience political life. It surveys eight dimensions – the impact of elections, freedom of speech, political pluralism, civic education, separation of powers, rule of law, government transparency, and peaceful transitions of power – then tracks how populations across the globe perceive the United States, China, Russia, and one another, and asks which side respondents support in five live or latent geopolitical conflicts. The result is a portrait of the world as billions of people actually see it, not as Western governments and their affiliated think tanks wish it to be seen.
What that portrait reveals, at its most fundamental level, is a global public that believes in democracy – across virtually every region and culture – but defines it in terms that diverge sharply from the definition promoted by Washington and its allies. More than two-thirds of people worldwide say it is extremely or very important for their country to be a democracy. The demand for self-governance, for fair institutions, for the peaceful transfer of power, is not in retreat. But when the survey asks what people consider democracy’s most important purpose, the answers reorder the priorities that Western leaders typically invoke. In 62 percent of countries surveyed, the top answer is improving living standards and well-being for everyone. Only 18 percent of countries prioritize promoting a fair and peaceful society, and a mere 9 percent – a figure that should give pause to every speechwriter who invokes “protecting individual rights and freedoms” as democracy’s defining purpose – place that goal first. Only in the United States itself, along with Germany, Italy, and Canada, does the protection of individual freedoms rise to the top.
This is not, as Western commentators tend to assume, evidence of authoritarian conditioning or political naivety among the global poor. It is evidence of rational prioritization. For billions of people across the Global South, in South Asia, in sub-Saharan Africa, in the Middle East and Latin America, the question of whether one can freely criticize the government on social media is less pressing than whether one’s children will have food, healthcare, and security from violence – including the violence that frequently arrives with Western “assistance.” The DPI data make this legible in a single, devastating comparison. The most positively perceived countries in the world are not the largest democracies or the most militarily powerful: they are Switzerland, Canada, Japan, Sweden, Italy, and Norway – countries associated, in the global imagination, with neutrality and the absence of aggression, social provision, good education, health care and security. The least positively perceived, in descending order of loathing, are Israel, North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, and the United States. What distinguishes the top from the bottom is not the presence or absence of elections. It is the presence or absence of violence.
The collapse of American standing is the study’s most dramatic finding, and its scale demands careful attention. Between 2024 and 2026, global net perception of the United States fell by nearly 40 points. In 2022 and 2023, the United States still registered a net positive global image. By 2026 that has inverted completely, to a net negative of minus sixteen globally – minus twenty-five across the Middle East and North Africa, minus thirty-five across Europe, and minus sixteen in Asia-Pacific. It remains marginally positive only in sub-Saharan Africa, and roughly neutral in the Americas, the region it has dominated politically and economically for two centuries. In Europe the pattern is particularly striking: the United States registers minus thirty-five, while China – despite Europe’s official posture of strategic competition with Beijing – registers only minus fourteen. Russia stands at minus forty-seven in Europe, the most negative of the three major powers. But the fact that the United States has now overtaken China as an object of European suspicion and displeasure is a seismic shift that Western policy establishments appear reluctant to absorb. The largest single-year declines in American perception between 2025 and 2026 occurred not in countries already hostile but in broadly neutral ones: Ivory Coast, Senegal, Serbia, Vietnam, Ghana, Cameroon, and Algeria all registered sharp drops. These are not countries animated by ideological opposition to American values. They are countries whose populations have watched American behavior and drawn their own conclusions.
The geopolitical conflict questions constitute an informal global referendum on the legitimacy of American power, and the results deserve to be read slowly. In the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, fifty-five countries side with Ukraine and thirty with Russia – a genuine majority for the Western-backed position, though considerably narrower than Western governments typically suppose, with MENA leaning toward Russia and Asia-Pacific evenly split. In the conflict between Israel and Palestine, fifty-one countries side with Palestine and only seventeen with Israel; the Americas are the only region that leans, mildly, toward Israel, while Europe, Asia-Pacific, MENA, and sub-Saharan Africa either lean toward Palestine or are evenly divided. In the conflict between the United States and Iran, forty-one countries side with Iran and only twenty-eight with the United States. In the dispute over Greenland and Denmark, eighty-five countries side with Greenland and Denmark and only two – the Dominican Republic and Israel – with the United States. Even the American public itself, when asked, leans twelve points toward Greenland and Denmark over its own government’s position, a finding that speaks to something deeper than foreign skepticism: the erosion of American self-confidence in the project of American power.
The pattern that emerges is not a simple division of the world into pro-Western and anti-Western camps. It is something more granular and more damning: the world evaluates each conflict on what it perceives as its particular merits, and in conflict after conflict where the United States is a direct party or the primary backer of one side, the world sides against it. This is not reflexive anti-Americanism. The same global publics that support Ukraine over Russia show no general sympathy for authoritarianism. What they appear to reject is a specific and recurring pattern of American conduct: the willingness to apply international rules selectively, to arm and shield states that violate those rules, and to claim exemption from legal constraint while insisting that others must submit to it.
That reading is powerfully reinforced by one of the study’s most important findings. Global support for a rules-based international order is not weakening – it is growing. Fifty percent of people across all 98 countries agree that nations should follow international laws and agreements even when doing so limits their freedom of action, against only 31 percent who disagree, for a net agreement of plus nineteen points, up from plus seventeen the previous year. The world does not want a lawless multipolar free-for-all. It wants rules applied consistently to everyone. What it increasingly rejects is a world in which one country reserves the right to stand above them.
This is the light in which the data on military bases must be read. In 86 of 97 countries, majorities oppose hosting American military bases on their soil – a posture sustained not by popular consent but by governmental arrangements that routinely override public preferences. The willingness of allied governments to maintain these arrangements against their own citizens’ wishes is itself a measure of how deeply American power distorts democratic accountability even within formally democratic states. On defense priorities, the picture is consistent: in 80 of 98 countries, the top choice for national protection is strengthening alliances and international partnerships, not military buildup, not nuclear deterrents, not mandatory military service. Globally, willingness to fight for one’s country has fallen sharply from 53 percent to 45 percent in a single year – suggesting not cowardice but a generalized exhaustion with the logic of militarization that has governed the post-2001 era.
The contrast with China’s standing requires careful analysis, because it reveals something more complex than a simple transfer of global affection from one great power to another. China is now viewed more favorably than the United States in 63 of 83 surveyed countries. In Europe, where official policy treats China as a systemic rival, China is nevertheless seen more positively than the United States in 20 of 23 surveying countries. In the Middle East and North Africa, the differential is especially vast: Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt view China far more positively than the United States, reflecting not only China’s restraint from military intervention in the region but the accumulated memory of what American intervention has actually produced there. Even Russia now registers a slightly more favorable global average than the United States – an outcome the study’s authors flag as unprecedented, and which they clearly find troubling. Yet the DPI’s own data resist the conclusion that this represents a global embrace of authoritarianism. What the authors call “global dealignment, not global realignment” is the more honest description: the world is not choosing China because it has fallen in love with Beijing’s governance model. It is not-choosing the United States because of what the United States has done. That distinction matters enormously, because it means the damage is self-inflicted – and therefore, in principle, reversible.
The domestic dimension of this crisis is also present in the data, though the study does not dwell on it. Citizens in established Western democracies are among the most pessimistic in the world about the direction of their own countries. Europe is the most pessimistic region by a wide margin, with France and Germany among the least optimistic countries surveyed anywhere on earth. Government transparency is the single most negatively rated dimension of democratic life across every region: citizens overwhelmingly believe their governments withhold important information from the public. Paradoxically, the most positive ratings on transparency come from Oman, Ethiopia, Vietnam, and China – reflecting partly the constraining effects of state media environments, but also capturing the experience of populations that feel, rightly or wrongly, that their governments speak to them rather than conceal from them. Among the countries that score highest on the DPI’s citizen-perception index, China ranks near the top of Asia-Pacific alongside India and Sri Lanka. The study notes carefully that this reflects restricted information environments rather than genuine democratic health. But it does not dissolve a more fundamental problem: in many countries where the West has promoted or imposed its democratic model, the material results have been poor enough that populations rate their own systems worse than Chinese citizens rate theirs. When the DPI finds that most of the world defines democracy’s primary purpose as improving living standards, and then finds that many formal democracies deliver neither decent living standards nor effective governance, the gap between democratic promise and democratic reality becomes impossible to paper over.
The Israel-Palestine data deserve particular attention because they reveal, perhaps more starkly than any other finding in the study, the precise mechanism by which American standing has collapsed. The survey was conducted between March and April of 2026, during an ongoing genocide in Gaza that had by that point killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and displaced the majority of the territory’s population. The United States has been not merely a bystander to this campaign but its principal enabler: supplying weapons, providing diplomatic cover in the United Nations Security Council, and maintaining public support for Israeli operations even as international courts have raised formal questions of genocide. Fifty-one countries side with Palestine; only seventeen with Israel. Every region of the world except the Americas leans toward Palestine. This is not, as some American commentators allege, a product of anti-Semitism or manipulation. It is a product of visibility. The genocidal campaign has been documented in real time on platforms accessible to billions of people who are measuring what they see against the standards of the international law the United States nominally champions – the destruction of hospitals, the blocking of humanitarian aid, the displacement of entire civilian populations, torture and rape, the targeting of children and women, doctors and journalists. The United States versus Iran result follows the same logic: forty-one countries side with Iran and only twenty-eight with the United States, a reflection of the accumulated memory of wars, occupations and sanctions that has made the United States, for much of the world’s population, a more plausible source of danger than the state it designates as a major threat.
The DPI does not frame its findings this way. Its foreword nudges readers toward the conclusion that perceptions are being distorted by adversarial information campaigns, that the world is being misled rather than drawing its own conclusions. The data support a different and simpler explanation. The countries where American perception has fallen most steeply are not subject to intensive Chinese or Russian propaganda – they are Senegal, Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Vietnam, societies with their own media ecosystems, their own colonial and post-colonial memories, and their own capacity to evaluate what they observe. The claim that global opinion is being moved primarily by foreign disinformation rather than by the content of Western policy is itself a form of condescension – a refusal to take seriously the rational judgments of billions of people who have decided that the evidence before them warrants the conclusions they are drawing.
The DPI 2026 is, in the end, an extraordinary document – not because it says anything that careful observers of global politics did not already suspect, but because of who produced it and in whose institutional interest it was designed. The Alliance of Democracies Foundation exists to make the case for the Western democratic order. The study it has co-produced makes, instead, the case against the behavior of the states that claim to lead that order. Rasmussen writes in his foreword that the decline in American perception is “saddening but not shocking.” He is right that it is not shocking. The shock lies elsewhere – in the distance between what Western governments say and what they do, and in the growing recognition, now measurable across ninety-eight countries and ninety percent of the human race, that this distance has become impossible to bridge with rhetoric alone.
The crisis of Western credibility is not a communications problem. It is not a failure of messaging, a consequence of foreign disinformation, or a misunderstanding that better public diplomacy could correct. It is a crisis of conduct – of what the United States and its closest allies have chosen to do with their power – at home and abroad. The world has been watching. The world has been counting the dead, mapping the displaced, tracing the flows of weapons, observing who vetoes accountability at the Security Council and who demands it. The DPI gives us, with rigorous methodology and global scale, the world’s answer – and that answer, in its breadth, its consistency, and its moral clarity, represents something that no democracy summit or think-tank report produced by the beneficiaries of the current order can wish away: the moment when the gap between a civilization’s proclaimed values and its practiced conduct becomes obvious not only to its victims, but to the entire watching world.
The Democracy Perception Index 2026 was produced by Nira Data in collaboration with the Alliance of Democracies Foundation, published in conjunction with the 2026 Copenhagen Democracy Summit, and is based on 94,146 nationally representative interviews across 98 countries conducted between March 19 and April 21, 2026.
Michael Holmes is a German-American freelance journalist specializing in global conflicts and modern history. His work has appeared in Neue Zürcher Zeitung – the Swiss newspaper of record – Responsible Statecraft, Psychologie Heute, taz, Welt, and other outlets. He regularly conducts interviews for NachDenkSeiten. He has reported on and traveled to over 70 countries, including Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Ukraine, Kashmir, Hong Kong, Mexico, and Uganda. He is based in Potsdam, Germany.
