Twenty-five years of democratic collapse, told as it was lived through the people caught inside it. Not an autopsy, not a forecast. A journey.

The story begins in Seattle in 1999, where a ten-year-old girl named Madeleine watches the first great anti-globalization protests from the third cordon, the angriest one, half-swallowed by an oversized jacket. It ends in March 2026, with the world burning on several fronts at once. In between: the post-9/11 wars, Lehman Brothers, the rise of Putin and Xi, the night of the Bataclan, Brexit, Trumpism, the October 7 pogrom, and a second Trump term that reads, in retrospect, like the last act of everything that came before it. Madeleine never disappears from the book. In the final pages, she receives a letter.

The argument is stark: liberal democracy did not collapse because of external dictators. It hollowed out from within – eroded by inequality, corrupted by algorithms, abandoned by shortsighted elites. The book coins the term “techno-feudalists” for Musk, Thiel, and Zuckerberg – digital lords who brought a president to heel and purchased the consent of millions. But the book’s most surprising claim is also its most hopeful: that the institution most likely to save liberal democracy is the battered, slow, imperfect European Union – a phoenix, as the book calls it, that may have to partly die before it can be reborn.

This is narrative nonfiction in the tradition of Geert Mak’s In Europa – history lived from the inside, built from scenes and characters rather than abstractions. The Italian vantage point is not a limitation but a lens: Italy was the first major Western democracy consumed by populism, which makes this both a witness account and an early warning, written by someone who watched democratic norms dissolve slowly, then suddenly, and lived to tell it.

In a crowded market, Tyrannis offers what its competitors cannot: the inside view from the continent with the most to lose.

About the author and keynote speaker Goffredo Buccini

A graduate in Classical Studies from the Tasso Lyceum in Rome and Sapienza University, and an alumnus of the Milan School of Journalism, he has written for Il Mattino, La Notte, Il Giornale, and La Repubblica. As an editorialist and special correspondent for Corriere della Sera, his scoops and interviews documented the ‘Mani Pulite’ investigation, earning him the 1995 Journalist of the Year Award.