Democratic Backsliding and Resilience In

Ruxandra Paul Assistant Professor, Political Science Department, Amherst College Visiting Scholar, Center for European Studies, Harvard University [email protected] * [email protected] September 20, 2019 Citizens of the Market Migration’s Rescue of Liberal Democracy and the European Union Thirty years after the fall of communism in 1989, the political trajectories of Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries continue to defy expectations. The early 1990s were dominated by concerns over the likelihood that democracy will not take root in CEE. Some predicted the erosion of support for democracy as a result of economic reforms (Przeworski, 1991), while others thought that “the danger of new dictatorship in Eastern Europe comes from the bottom, not from the top” (Ost, 1992). The mid-1990s and early 2000s brought reassurance that democratic CEE polities worked fairly well (Levitz and Pop-Eleches, 2010; Roberts, 2009). Some saw the region as an “unqualified democratic success story” and declared earlier analogies with Latin America misplaced (Greskovits, 1998). The first couple of decades after the end of the Cold War seemed to bode well for postcommunist new democracies. Since 2004, eleven CEE have countries joined the European Union (EU). Many noted that Poland and Hungary had rapidly consolidated (Linz and Stepan, 1996) and thought they “passed the point of no return” making “authoritarian reversal” inconceivable (Ekiert and Kubik, 1998). In the 2000s, however, it became clear that earlier optimism had been somewhat premature. Some warned of “democratic fatigue” and populist backlash (Rupnik, 2007). What was most puzzling, however, was the uneven way in which backsliding affected the region. In the last decade, the political trajectories of Central and Eastern European countries have reversed. The frontrunners of democratization and Europeanization (countries like Hungary and Poland) have experienced democratic backsliding, as signaled by destabilization or return to semi- authoritarian practices. Scholars also noted a “hollowing,” or declining popular involvement in democracy (Greskovits, 2015). According to Nations in Transit, Hungary declined from Consolidated Democracy into Semi-Consolidated Democracy status (its current overall democracy 1 Ruxandra Paul Assistant Professor, Political Science Department, Amherst College Visiting Scholar, Center for European Studies, Harvard University [email protected] * [email protected] September 20, 2019 score is 3.71 – Freedom House rates countries on a scale from 1 to 7, with 1 representing the highest and 7 the lowest level of democratic quality). In 2017, the country experienced the largest cumulative decline in Nations in Transit history, after its scores had been falling for ten consecutive years. Poland recorded the largest category decline and the second-largest Democracy Score decline in the history of the report, but remains in the consolidated democracy category with an overall score of 2.89. Some argued Hungary and Poland “can no longer be considered liberal democracies” because their governments have established authoritarian institutional systems that give “largely unrestricted political power to the ruling party” (Ekiert, 2017). Meanwhile, former postcommunist laggards (countries like Romania and Bulgaria) have shown resilience and now outperform Hungary and Poland on some measures of democratic quality and political stability (overall democracy score, electoral process, civil society etc.). What explains this surprising reversal in which the leaders of democratization have become its laggards, and the laggards are now taking the lead? What makes some countries more resilient to populism and illiberalism than others? Hungary, Poland and Slovakia all witnessed attacks on constitutional courts and the rule of law, violations of civil rights, the introductions of restrictions on freedom of the press, and policies meant to weaken opposition parties and strengthen the executive (Roberts, 2018). Many anti- establishment populist politicians, like Czech billionaire and current Prime Minister Andrej Babis, whose party ANO 2011 (Action of Dissatisfied Citizens) build his career on declaring that the political establishment is immoral and needs to be discarded. The Czech Republic elicited comparisons with Weimar Germany after Milos Zeman, the first president that the country elected directly (in 2013), defied Parliament by installing one of his confidants as prime minister (Müller, 2014). Democratic backsliding has been so severe that the EU moved towards imposing Article 7 sanctions against Hungary and Poland. Article 7 of the Lisbon Treaty can be triggered when one of the EU’s member states violates “human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.” In Poland, since winning elections in October 2015, the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party has passed reforms that reduced judicial independence and politicized the media, clamped 2 Ruxandra Paul Assistant Professor, Political Science Department, Amherst College Visiting Scholar, Center for European Studies, Harvard University [email protected] * [email protected] September 20, 2019 down on civil society, and branded those criticizing it as traitors. Laws passed in 2017 give the PiS dominated Sejm (parliament) full control over the election of members of the National Judicial Council (NJC), an institution that appoints judges across the country. In December 2016, Poland’s parliament adopted an amendment to the Law on Assemblies, which authorities then used to ban certain protests and rallies. Judges that supported the citizens’ rights to protest peacefully in their rulings were subject to disciplinary proceedings. Jaroslaw Kaczynski accused political opponents of collaborating with the former communist-era secret police, of being traitors, and “the worst sort of Poles.” In June 2018, Amnesty International warned that the right to peaceful protest is under serious threat in Poland. In 2017, the EU moved towards adopting formal sanctions against Poland for failing to uphold democracy at home: in December, Article 7 was triggered, and Poland became the first country to elicit that action in EU history. In 2018, the EU Commission sued Poland at the Court of Justice of the European Union for its decision to force judges to retire (Poland passed a law which lowers the retirement age of judges on the Supreme Court from 70 to 65, which effectively forces 27 of the 72 sitting judges into retirement). The Commission found the law incompatible with EU law, because it undermines judicial independence, and harms the EU’s legal order by creating a risk of serious and irreparable damage in Poland. In Hungary, Viktor Orban and his FIDESZ party have transformed the country into “a semi-authoritarian state,” a model that Polish PiS emulated (Kelemen and Orenstein, 2016). After coming to power in 2010, Orban’s government launched a “constitutional revolution to eliminate independent checks on its power and consolidate Fidesz’s rule for years to come” (idem supra). Hungary’s Constitutional Court was a target: Orban’s government first changed the procedure for appointing judges to allow the parliamentary majority to appoint without consulting the opposition. In 2011, a new constitution expanded the Constitutional Court, allowing Orban to pack it with Fidesz loyalists. When the Court declared some of Orban’s measures unconstitutional, the government amended the Constitution in 2013 to limit the Court’s power further. Orban also replaced and reorganized independent public bodies whose mission was to keep government’s powers in check (like the National Election Commission and the National Media Board), attacked 3 Ruxandra Paul Assistant Professor, Political Science Department, Amherst College Visiting Scholar, Center for European Studies, Harvard University [email protected] * [email protected] September 20, 2019 mass media and civil society organizations, and modified the country’s electoral system (Kelemen and Orenstein, 2016). In September 2018, the European Parliament voted to censure the Hungarian government for eroding democracy and failing to uphold fundamental EU values, a vote that opened the door for Article 7 sanctions to be imposed, including a temporary loss of EU Council voting rights. A report authored by MEP Judith Sargentini found that Orban’s attacks on mass media independence, academics and universities, the independence of the judiciary, migrants and refugees, and minority rights posed a “systemic threat to the EU’s fundamental principles.” While attempts at undermining rule of law also took place in Romania, the outcome was different. On August 10, 2018, one hundred thousand people gathered in Victoriei Square in Bucharest, Romania, to protest against government decrees that many (including the European Commission and the US Department of State) said would undermine the fight against corruption, weaken the rule of law, and reduce judicial independence. The protests had no identifiable organizers in Romania. On social media, Romanians working abroad in the EU coordinated efforts and spread the word in the months before the demonstration. The movement galvanized under the motto Diaspora Vine Acasa (“Diaspora Comes Home”). It remained a broad, non- hierarchical, leaderless collective, separate from the political establishment, but powerful enough to bring migrants and non-migrants together in support of common political

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