This is devastating to find out. My interactions with Marisa were very limited but quite significant to me.

I rescued a two-month street kitten while on the EA Zanzibar residency. When I got back stateside, she tested (faint) positive for a disease and my partner did not want to risk exposing the other cats to her. I urgently needed to find a place to stay with her while we waited to re-test her, and I was running out of options.

I had only met Marisa once in-person before. A mutual friend suggested talking to her. She was visiting family for the Easter weekend and let me stay with my kitten at her place. Marisa was invaluable in that moment of personal crisis for me.

I would start with some version of the child drowning scenario in Peter Singer's Famine Affluence and Morality.

Two considerations:
1. does protecting democracy have to be "painting with leftist colors"?
2. even if it was, does the ROI justify it?

On the first, as noted in this EAGxVirtual lightning talk I gave on the US context, the design of the political system is a big upstream cause of authoritarian voter bases and to a larger extent authoritarian politicians. Many of the reforms to the US political system that would in the short to long term reduce the antidemocratic threat are "bi-populist," as I like to call it.

Left- and Right-wing populists are generally for campaign finance reform, preventing politicians from becoming lobbyists, having a districting and voting system that enables third parties, etc. There are some notable ver partisan exceptions like moving from the electoral college to national popular vote and making the Senate less minoritarian.

In the US context, I think disciplined and skilled advocates can keep political system reform as populist/anti-establishment issue and avoid culture war framing. I'm not sure how this generalizes to Europe or Germany. While I don't think it generalizes 100%, I suspect it generalizes at least a little.

On the second, I think the ROI from this issue is uniquely higher than other political issues. small-L liberal democracies (e.g. Germany, United States, Italy, etc) falling into something other than liberal democracies (Hungary is a good example of this) strikes me as patently super bad for suffering of humans/animals, the longterm future, EA agenda, and any other issues that we might care about. I think this is uniquely true of the United States because it is the world superpower and leading place for emerging technologies. However, the stakes are high even in places like Germany. How much would be lost alone by an authoritarian nativist government coming to power and eliminating all German foreign aid?

In short, if the Great Powers stop being liberal democracies, a lot of our agenda becomes moot because we will now have bigger problems. Instead of working to make German aid more effective, we will be working to get the govt to give any aid at all and ensure an authoritarian govt doesn't manipulate the political process to never relinquish power. Instead of working to get the United States Government to approach international AI coordination in a way that doesn't lead to an international arms race in capabilities, we will be fighting to keep a strongman from disrupting the global world order that that coordination is underpinned by.
 

Here is another EA Forum post that talks at length about democracy defense in the US context.

I would try to improve the political system which is upstream of the dysfunctional politics which is upstream of bad policy that leads to needless policy in the US. I think you'll get better ROI be cause the dividends will affect so many other areas EAs care about.

And the results are in. They do save lives:

https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/374614/9789240086104-eng.pdf?sequence=1