The Bonfire of the Gatekeepers: A Reflection on OGP at 15

In Florence in 1497, Savonarola’s followers piled the vanities of a corrupt society into the Piazza della Signoria and set them alight: cosmetics, fine clothes, books, paintings, ornaments — the baubles of a civilisation judged to have lost its virtue.

Donald Trump has staged a bonfire of his own, even if less ostentatiously picturesque. Nobody has – yet – thrown the director of a ‘woke’ museum or an ethics agency onto a Pennsylvania Avenue pyre. 

The flames are administrative rather than literal, but the animating idea is familiar: institutions portrayed as corrupt, obstructive or illegitimate must be stripped away so that government can once again express the authentic will of the people, AKA the President’s whim.

And what has been burning is a filigree; intricate, delicate, capable nonetheless of sustaining democracy yet rarely celebrated: the soft power of democracy’s gatekeepers. 

We imagine democracy as protected by hard things — constitutions, courts, electionsImproving transparency in elections and maintaining the independence of electoral commissions is vital for promoting trust in the electoral system, preventing electoral fraud, and upholding the democr... More and legislatures, even armies. 

But interlaced among those pillars is a softer architecture: inspectors general, Ombudsmen, independent regulators, professional civil servants, whistleblowers, investigative journalists, public broadcasters, freedom-of-information laws — and the unfashionable convention that governments should sometimes have to yield and account to a power that cannot force it to do so. 

Fifteen years ago, in a very different Washington, this philosophy acquired an institution.

The Open Government PartnershipThe Open Government Partnership (OGP) is a multi-stakeholder initiative focused on improving government transparency, ensuring opportunities for citizen participation in public matters, and strengthen... More was launched in 2011 by eight governments, including Barack Obama’s United States, working alongside civil society. The proposition was defiantly optimistic: governments work better when they are transparent, accountable and open to citizen participationAccording to OGP’s Articles of Governance, citizen participation occurs when “governments seek to mobilize citizens to engage in public debate, provide input, and make contributions that lead to more ... More.

Today OGP reaches 73 countries and more than 135 local jurisdictions. Its world is one of open budgets and contracts, freedom of information, citizens’ assemblies and other forms of deliberative democracy, whistleblower protection and the belief that citizens should participate in government between elections, not merely judge it every four or five years.

Then, in January this year, the United States — the country that helped create it — withdrew from OGP.

It would be difficult to devise a tidier symbol of the journey from Obama to Trump.

OGP embodies precisely the kind of power now under pressure. It cannot command, prosecute or imprison. A citizens’ assembly cannot force a minister to accept its conclusions. An Ombudsman has no army, and an independent auditor cannot overturn an election.

The weaponry instead is the creation of friction, of discomfort rather than explicit punishment.  It asks questions, exposes inconvenient facts, points to the gap between what a democratic government should do and what it does do.

Trump has repeatedly tested how much of that friction can be removed.

Within days of returning to office in 2025 he fired 17 federal inspectors general, watchdogs charged with exposing waste, fraud and abuse. The dismissals generated bipartisan concern because federal law required advance notice and detailed reasons to Congress. Trump, as ever, simply bulldozed on.

Soft power had just become softer, more malleable, the IG replacements and those of other watchdogs needing no further instruction on how to bend the knee. 

The institutions and agencies – although not all – continue to exist, but as simulacra, and that is the point. Trump didn’t need any tanks; a brutal trimming of the inconvenient undergrowth around executive power was sufficient.

In this atmosphere – contagious, seductive to some – Europe cannot be complacent.

Viktor Orbán hardly needed lessons from Washington in how to weaken institutional checks. But in 2025 he explicitly cited Trump’s assault on USAID as inspiration for a new drive against foreign-funded independent media and NGOs, the United States as convenient precedent and not – as his EU partners increasingly viewed it – as trouble.

Slovakia is another European example of why apparently obscure institutions matter. Its government moved in late 2025 to dissolve the independent Whistleblower Protection Office and weaken protections against retaliation. 

Intervention by the European Commission eventually forced a retreat. The office survived. But the episode showed how easily one of democracy’s minor pieces of machinery can become a political target.

In Italy the independence of the state broadcaster RAI has become increasingly contested under Giorgia Meloni;  the removal this August of investigative journalist Sigfrido Ranucci from its flagship Report programme triggered accusations of political interference, which RAI rejected.

The more interesting example of Trump Creep may, however, lie in Brussels.

The European Union remains one of the world’s more determined defenders of civic space. Its new Democracy Shield and Civil Society Strategy explicitly promise to protect civil society, strengthen citizen participation and provide substantial future funding for civic organisations.

Yet even here the climate has changed.

The European Court of Auditors was right to expose weak transparencyAccording to OGP’s Articles of Governance, transparency occurs when “government-held information (including on activities and decisions) is open, comprehensive, timely, freely available to the public,... More around €7.4 billion of EU funding awarded to NGOs between 2021 and 2023. Public money demands public scrutiny.

But the ensuing political argument moved beyond dry bookkeeping. The European Parliament created a special working group to examine whether EU grants funded NGO advocacy directed at EU institutions, or some saw it, against EU institutions.

Parliament has since stressed that such scrutiny must remain neutral, proportionate and evidence-based, warning against “selective transparency” and reaffirming civil society’s legitimate democratic role. 

It recognised that while transparency can illuminate power; it can also, selectively applied, become a means by which power intimidates its critics.

These European examples hardly constitute a Trumpian bonfire. But viruses – like flames – spread and know no borders. Ideas migrate. We see it in attacks on civil society, in new, harsher, norms around the treatment of migrants, in gatekeepers brushed aside, in growing amnesia around our brutal European past.

All of which leaves organisations such as OGP in an uncomfortable position on their fifteenth birthday. Created in an era when governments broadly accepted openness and accountability as virtues, what happens when governments begin to regard scrutiny as sabotage, and civil society as opposition by another name?

The temptation is to conclude that soft democratic power has failed, yet it is perhaps its very softness that makes it easier to navigate and carry through the chaos.

Abandoning an international partnership can be done with the stroke of a sharpie; but no one can easily extinguish an idea distributed among 73 countries, hundreds of cities and thousands of civic organisations. 

City mayors can still do amazing things for their communities. Citizens’ assemblies can be established locally without need of national benediction. Parliaments can still project and protect their constitutional legitimacy and obligations. Freedom-of-information laws can still be operated. Norms can survive even if laws do not.

That may be the real message of OGP’s fifteenth anniversary. Transparency, participation and accountability were once the worthy accessories of the optimistic Obama era. They may now be democracy’s survival toolkit.

Savonarola’s bonfire destroyed objects. Trump’s America has demonstrated how so much else, intangible yet precious, can also be turned to ashes.

OGP’s task for its next fifteen years is to demonstrate how much nonetheless can still be rescued, restored and even, optimistically, renewed.