When Caligula announced his intention to appoint his horse Incitatus as senator, the historians of the time immediately understood that it was not madness, but a message. It was not the grotesque gesture of an eccentric emperor, but a demonstration of power: the signal that institutions could be mocked, emptied, turned into a stage stripped of all dignity. It was enough to invoke the horse to understand that the Senate no longer counted for anything. The animal would never actually debate laws, but it would prove a much harsher truth: power no longer needed competence, nor respect for formalities. It needed only loyalty.
Today that image, which at school we are taught as a curious anecdote from ancient Rome, returns with surprising relevance. The democratura – an authoritarian style of government that preserves a democratic façade – is a word we learned to associate with distant regimes, with “problematic” countries, with disguised authoritarian systems. Yet it is no longer an exotic phenomenon. It has put down roots in the West as well, not through the brutality of coups, but through the elegance of gradual processes. It spreads wherever citizens cease to have a central role and become mere observers; wherever politics adopts the language of technical procedure; wherever representation turns into a repetitive mechanism, made more of ritual than of real decisions.
Caligula’s horse keeps speaking to us precisely because it never appears where it should, but where we least expect it. It no longer wears the skin of an animal led into the Senate as a provocation. It takes the form of figures who occupy public office without a real mandate, of people who answer first to a party leader and only second—if at all—to democratic accountability, of institutions that accept becoming mere scenery. Western democratura does not abolish freedoms; it tames them. It does not tear down parliaments; it turns them into arenas where everything has already been decided. It does not suppress opposition; it sterilizes it in a ritual game where differences serve more to entertain than to truly represent.
In this climate, some reflections by Pope Leo XIV also become relevant. On several occasions he has warned of the risk that contemporary democracies may progressively lose their “popular substance,” crushed between technical procedures and an ever-growing distance from citizens. This is not a point about geopolitics, but about the cultural and institutional drift that leads communities to feel like spectators rather than protagonists.
Ultimately, it is the same mechanism Caligula had grasped two thousand years ago. You don’t actually need to bring a horse into the Senate. You just need to convince everyone that it no longer makes any difference who is sitting there. Democratura grows precisely on this terrain: in the normalization of the senseless, in the indifference toward appointments that look more like rewards for loyalty than recognition of merit, in the transformation of politics into a liturgy in which the citizen no longer feels they have a role.
The real question, then, is not whether that ancient horse would truly have become a senator. The question is how much we are willing to accept so that our institutions may continue to seem functional, even as their vitality is slowly dissolving. And it is in that question that the image of Incitatus stops being a schoolroom anecdote and becomes a living warning. Not so much for what it once was, but for what it risks becoming again. In the West we will not see a horse cross the threshold of Parliament—but we may fail to notice when, metaphorically, we have long since accepted it.
