I wonder if there is a better standard bearer? The UK has a lot of the same gerrymandering. Israel, Australia. France has people accusing macron of staging a coup, people questioning voter requirements. And that is the top tier, compared to Spain, Venezuela, Taiwan.
I certainly think there's better. "Standard bearer" might be setting different countries up for a fall... I think there's also a lot of rather different thinsg going on in different places.
The UK doesn't have have shamelessly overt "politician choosing their voters" "classical" gerrymandering the US does. Boundaries are handled by a commission -- imaginatively called "the Boundary Commission" which as far as I know is genuinely independent and non-partisan. There's certainly some scope for incumbent governments to screw around with that all the same. They can change the sizes of constituencies, and they can "purge" electoral rolls in such a way as to distort these. The current Tory regime has been accused of both. The latter is slightly like a hybrid of voter suppression and gerrymandering. The biggest issue is I think the "first past the post" system, which is hugely distorting of outcomes. The US suffers from this too, exacerbated by the huge "winner takes all" constituency sizes in federal elections, but mitigated by having closer to an actual two-party system, as opposed to 2.75-party system (in England, it gets weirder still in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland). An almost now-unique hellaciousness of the UK is the "no constitution" angle. Sure, they'll
tell you there's an "unwritten constitution" and other such meaningless statements, but the legal effect is straightforward parliamentary dictatorship. Get a house-of-commons majority (in practice never needing a popular vote majority, as above), and you can do what you like -- no checks and balances.
Most European and other developed countries fix FPTP by some sort of proportional representation. In Ireland there's again an independent BC, so no high-order gerrymandering. There's fairly blatant localism and clientalism due to the particular system of PR, but that'd hardly shock or stun most US voters, I don't think. I couldn't comment in any detail about the gerrymandering sitch elsewhere.
I've never heard this notion of a Macron coup. The worry there if anything is a far-right ethnonationalist like Le Pen or Zemmour winning the presidency. Might not behave terribly democratically if they won, but they do still have to win it in the first place in a pretty much straightforwardly democratic manner.
Spain one might accuse of having
too much constitution, given the whole "putting peaceful and democratic secessionists in jail" thing. Plus they haven't made it a half-century since their last formal dictatorship -- Francoism, the original "fascist, who us?!" protesters-too-much! -- so not a great deal of room for complacency there.
Honestly though? Way more to worry about in the US than in any if the above, for my money. Even if we didn't have to worry about the "when America catches a cold" effect.