" MANY STUDIES POINT TO recent historical events to explain today’s turn away from democracy, like the 2008 recession and increases in global migration that heightened racist sentiments. Other works go back to the collapse of Communism in 1989–1990. Unleashing nationalist and tribalist sentiments in Eastern Europe, it encouraged the resurgence of the far right in Western Europe as well. Putin, the former Communist functionary who is now a leader of the global right, successfully rode that tide of political upheaval and ideological transformation "

― Ruth Ben-Ghiat , Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present