Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions that follow. In 1973, only 45 of the world’s 151 countries were counted as ’free’ by Freedom House, a nongovernmental organization that produces quantitative measures of civil and political rights for countries around the world. The following generation saw momentous political change, with democracies and market-oriented economies spreading in virtually every part of the world except for the Arab Middle East.

This transformation was Samuel Huntington’s third wave of democratization; liberal democracy as the default form of government became part of the accepted political landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Underlying these changes in political systems was a massive social transformation as well. The shift to democracy was a result of millions of formerly passive individuals around the world organizing themselves and participating in the political life of their societies. This social mobilization was driven by a host of factors: greatly expanded access to education that made people more aware of themselves and the political world around them; information technology, which facilitated the rapid spread of ideas and knowledge; cheap travel and communications that allowed people to vote with their feet if they didn’t like their government; and greater prosperity, which induced people to demand better protection of their rights. The third wave crested after the late 1990s, however, a ’democratic recession’ emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Approximately one in five countries that had been part of the third wave either reverted to authoritarianism or saw a significant erosion of democratic institutions. Freedom house noted that 2009 marked the fourth consecutive year in which freedom had declined around the world, the first time this had happened since it established its measures of freedom in 1973. [279 words] (Extracted from The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama)

According to this passage, when was the first time the freedom had declined around the world