With the caveats that I can’t make a good judgment about a foreign country just from the news, that I have no training in political science or law, and that linguistic treadmills make it easy to lose track of how strong a word is from one year to the next…

One can have greater and lesser forms of a thing, and “totalitarianism” does not need to be a boolean — worse forms of it don’t need to be rendered termless by lesser forms.