Little autocrats

2025-07-15 17:21:00, Opinione Ardi Stefa

Little autocrats
When political slavery masquerades as love for democracy, zeal turns into blindness and loyalty into institutional violence.

In the political history of countries with fragile democracies, a strange phenomenon has often been observed: the birth and rise of “petty autocrats.” It is not about great leaders, those who carry the name and power on themselves, but about obedient soldiers, often without a profile and integrity, who become more dangerous than the boss they follow.

They are the ones who carry out every order with extreme zeal, even when it conflicts with law, ethics, or reason. They are the directors who try to anticipate the wishes of the big boss before he articulates them. They are the deputies who speak with more passion than the leader himself, who attack, criticize, belittle, and belittle every critical voice, every different opinion, every opposition inside and outside the party. They are obedient soldiers who try to appear more Catholic than the Pope, more loyal than the king himself, in a feverish competition of servility and brutality.

This is not just grotesque, it is dangerous.

Petty autocrats are the distorted mirror of power: they make it look even more grotesque, ridiculous, and violent than it is. They are mindless zeal, fanaticism without ideals, and the loyalty that bites the citizen to get the applause of the boss. They are the most personalityless people, but the most dangerous: because they have no vision, no values, no brakes.

Petty autocrats are like metastases of a cancer that may have originated at the center of power, but that risks destroying the entire institutional body. They have no ideology, no vision, no responsibility. They have only one motive: survival through servility. That is why they are often stricter in punishments, more ruthless in dismissals, noisier in campaigns, more violent in clashes. They carry out the order not because they believe it, but because they fear oblivion.

Many times, leaders don't need to be dictators. It's enough to have these obedient satellites around them who implement every whim as if it were law, every whim as if it were a constitutional principle.

When there is no meritocracy, transparency, control and accountability in a political system, these “little ones” take the form of a new elite, not for merit, but for proximity to power. This is where the degradation begins: obedience replaces reason, partisanship takes the place of citizenship, servility is rewarded more than professionalism.
And when these replace people with free thinking, institutions turn into huts, law into decor, and democracy into a facade.

In every country where democracy is fragile, “petty autocrats” are a symptom and a cause of failure. They do not criticize, they do not question, they do not analyze. The only thing they know how to do well is to incite hatred through deception, to stroke the leader’s ego and manipulate him until they turn him into a grotesque emperor, disconnected from reality.

In the end, the damage is colossal. Because while the leader may leave, the petty autocrats remain. They sow a culture of fear, silence, conformity, submission.

Democracy and the rule of law do not need autocrats, neither big nor small. They need free citizens, honest officials, courageous politicians. And above all, a political culture where obedience is not blindness and loyalty is not submission.