I suspect there is not a single word for it. You may need to use various words like "corrupt democracy" or "fake democracy" or variations.

@puppetsock - yes, but a corrupt or fake democracies are not necessarily dictatorships in disguise.

In English, we'll just start using that very term for its rich meaning. Then we move on to liaise, go on sorties with guerrilla tactics, capeech stuff intuitively, pay up in shekels or moolah, and blitz our audience.

As a neologism, 'democrature' doesn't have any implied meaning to me other than it has something to do with democracy... it sounds like a misremembering of 'democracy' and has no whiff of a false democracy. Does '-ature' have any connotations that add the 'false' to things in French (like '-athon- adds a marathon flavor to things in English)?

Dictocracy! It does sound a bit like a clock, but it produces the satisfyingly-insulting word dictocrat. "He's an utter dictocrat"

la democracie et la dictature, so: democrature. So, following suite: one is obliged to go with democraship, since the ure means ship.

For what it's worth, searching for democratura on Italian Wikipedia redirects to anocrazia, which has the English cognate anocracy. It's definitely a related word, but it doesn't have the same shades of meaning as the French word; anocracy implies that there is some real, if incomplete, democratic control over policy.

@Michael Seifert- please refer to the link I provided. Is it from Treccani Dictionary, the OED of Italian dictionaries.

Nowadays, you can might as well use just dictatorship, as explicit dictatorships are almost, if not completely, extinct.

The word exists in multiple German languages too, from Wikipedia Danish, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Swedish.

The cynic at me wants to say "business as usual". looks at the recent American election

@Gio: To be clear, I wasn't saying that the Wikipedia definition was more accurate or useful than the Treccani definition. I was just explaining how I had found a related word. Using the "This page in other languages" tool on Wikipedia can sometimes be helpful in translating technical words and phrases, but it obviously didn't work perfectly here.

"Demockracy," perhaps?

"The Government"

Please note that with SWRs the simple answer is often "there's no such word." Please don't painfully stretch for SWRs where none exist.

@d-b: in French, it's a combination of démorcatie and dictature. In German it's a combination of Demokratie and Diktatur. In Swedish, it's a combination of demokrati and diktatur. In Dutch, it's a combination of democratie and dictatuur. What would democrature be in English? A combination of democracy and legislature? I don't believe it makes sense in English.

@PeterShor Just introduce in English. The meaning of the word is intuitive for anyone that understands the word democracy and dictature.

@d-b: Dictature is not an English word that anybody understands. See Ngrams.

@PeterShor Anyone with the most miniscule knowledge of languages should understand it. Dictature with some minor spelling variations are used by so disparate European languages such as French, Finnish, Azerbaijan, Basque, German, Croatian, Kurdish, Hungarian etc. Even Irish (Gaeilge) use it. I wonder if this is one of the most cross-language "complicated" words that exists (complicated as opposed to "one", "mama", "yes", "hello" and similar words).

Something that looks like a democracy but isn't, I'd call a democra-see

As a side note, I'm always amused at how some people seem to believe that there exists a single "democracy" in this world that is not run by sham elections at the most fundamental level.

Insert obligatory joke here about how all democracies are already like that...

like north korea?

trololol @JeremyHolovacs

I suspect no English term comes closer to “democrature” than your own "dictatorship pretending to be a democracy (through fraudulent elections)…"

@RobbieGoodwin - you are probably right, but it is curious nobody has coined a similar expression yet.

Contemporary Russia

Going forward into the future, and given the current political direction... we will need a word for this. Maybe Heinlein was right.

As a native French speaker, I must mention that I've never come across the term démocrature, so it is not common, although easy enough to understand.

@VincentFourmond - also in Italian it is not a common word, it is a neologism which has found its way into dictionaries. But I’ve noticed that recently , probably because of current global geopolitical dynamics, the term is used more frequently especially in sociopolitical contexts.

Are you Syrian? #AskingForFriend