Ghana has earned, and to some extent jealously guards, a reputation as West Africa's most reliable democracy. Six peaceful transfers of power since the return to multiparty elections in 1992. A Supreme Court that struck down the results of a presidential election in Kenya not because Ghana intervened but because Ghanaians looked at that precedent and knew it was possible. A press culture that is raucous, combative, and meaningfully free. A military that has stayed in its barracks through electoral disputes that in neighboring countries produced coups. The reputation is deserved. It is also, increasingly, something that Ghanaians are being asked to live up to under conditions more difficult than those in which the reputation was built. The economic crisis that struck Ghana between 2022 and 2023 was severe by any measure. The government defaulted on its external debt for the first time in the country's history. The cedi lost more than half its value against the dollar in a matter of months. Inflation peaked at levels that made everyday food purchases a serious burden for ordinary households. The International Monetary Fund program that the government eventually negotiated came with conditions, primarily around reducing fuel subsidies and expanding the tax base, that fell hardest on the same urban middle class that had been Ghana's most enthusiastic democracy promoters. The political consequences are still working their way through the system. The party that oversaw the crisis lost the most recent presidential election, which in one sense demonstrated that democratic accountability is functioning: voters held the ruling party responsible for economic mismanagement. But the depth of the economic discontent has also elevated voices, including some that were not meaningfully present in Ghanaian politics five years ago, that question whether the conventional architecture of structural adjustment and external borrowing serves Ghanaian citizens rather than Ghanaian creditors. These are not new questions in African political economy. They are, however, new to a generation of Ghanaian voters who came of age during the commodity-driven growth years of the 2000s and who have until recently experienced democracy as something that coexisted with improving living standards rather than as something that had to be defended during material hardship. The new government has been in office long enough to begin showing its own shape. It has made some moves that have reassured international investors while generating criticism at home for being too accommodating to IMF conditionality. It has made other moves, particularly around local content requirements in the extractive industries, that have caused friction with foreign companies. The balance it is trying to strike between fiscal sustainability and visible economic nationalism is real and difficult, and the political space in which to maneuver is not large. Beyond the immediate economic questions, Ghana faces a set of longer-term challenges that its democratic institutions will need to address. The conflict between pastoralists and farmers in the north, driven by climate-related shifts in rainfall and land availability, has created low-level violence that has proved resistant to resolution. Coastal erosion is threatening fishing communities and urban neighborhoods on the Atlantic coast in ways that existing planning frameworks are not well-equipped to handle. And a wave of illegal small-scale gold mining, galamsey, has destroyed stretches of rivers and forest that are not easily restored, creating an environmental emergency that previous governments promised to address and largely did not. None of these are democracy-destroying problems on their own. Countries with much weaker institutions have managed worse. But they are the kind of accumulating pressures that can erode faith in democratic problem-solving if the institutions consistently prove unable to produce visible results. What Ghana has going for it is the depth of the democratic culture that has developed over thirty years. Not just the procedures but the habits: journalists who will investigate the government regardless of which party is in power, civil society organizations that know how to organize and litigate, citizens who have voted in close and contested elections and seen the outcome respected. These are assets that are easier to deplete than to accumulate. The current moment is, among other things, a test of whether they are resilient enough to hold.