Democratic backsliding by country – Europe

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This article discusses instances of democratic backsliding by country in Europe . Democratic backsliding is the process of a country losing democratic qualities over time.

Contents

Bosnia and Herzegovina

The President of Republika Srpska, Alliance of Independent Social Democrats leader Milorad Dodik, has been accused of backsliding by the International Press Institute through his support for new defamation laws, foreign agent registration laws and restrictions on media registration as NGOs. [1]

Czech Republic

The coinciding tenure from 2017 to 2021 of ANO 2011 leader Andrej Babiš and his ally, President Miloš Zeman, has been described by analysts Sean Hanley and Milada Anna Vachudova as a period of democratic backsliding, albeit to a less drastic degree than Poland or Hungary. [2] However, other academics such as Elisabeth Bakke and Nick Sitter have disputed this, describing it as "conceptual stretching" and claiming that "exceptional factors" that existed in Hungary and Poland are not applicable to the Czech Republic. [3]

France

The legislative elections held in France on 30 June and 7 July 2024 resulted in the victory of the left-wing coalition group NFP. Despite the result, Emmanuel Macron decided to nominate as Prime minister Michel Barnier. Michel Barnier belongs to the republicans party or LR which came 4th in the electoral race with 46 seats, [4] far behind the 182 seats obtained by the Nouveau Front Populaire.

Macron decided not to respect the French political traditions which consists in nominating a prime minister who belongs to the party that has the most seats in the national assembly, which is considered by political analysts as the fair thing to do in a democracy. Nevertheless, Macron bypassed that tacit rule by pretexting France could not afford a left-wing party in government. In that regard, the legislative elections were seen by many as a mockery of the democratic process and especially by all the people who supported the left political party during the elections, many of whom went as far as to vote for the party of Emmanuel Macron at the second turn of elections in order to avoid having the nationalist party of Marine Le Pen taking control of Parliament.

Furthermore, Emmanuel Macron's government has been using 49.3 [5] quite regularly in Parliament to pass unpopular laws. The 49.3 is an element of the French constitution which allows the government to forcefully pass a law by bypassing the votes in the national assembly. Therefore, if a law is rejected by the parliamentary vote, the government can use 49.3 to impose the law all the same. Emmanuel Macron's government has implemented numerous unpopular laws using the 49.3. It is yet another example of France's backsliding from democratic practices since 49.3 is seen in essence as an autocratic way of ruling.

Georgia

Georgia's governing party, Georgian Dream (GD), was accused of democratic backsliding in a 2019 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, for failing to approve more representative electoral reform proposals. [6] U.S. Senators Jim Risch and Jeanne Shaheen accused Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia of backsliding for not implementing the reforms. [7] The electoral system was ultimately reformed ahead of the 2020 Georgian parliamentary election in a compromise between the Georgian government and the opposition. [8]

Iulia-Sabina Joja of the Middle East Institute has disputed allegations of democratic backsliding against the Georgian government, stating that "Georgia has fared well over the last eight years and GD has stayed on the path of democratization and reform" and drawing attention to Georgian improvements on corruption perception and press freedom indices. [9]

In 2023, Georgian Dream proposed the "Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence", which would require non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to register as foreign agents or "organizations carrying the interests of a foreign power" and disclose the sources of their income. This was described as democratic backsliding by the Council on Foreign Relations and led to the 2023–2024 Georgian protests. [10] The EU responded by freezing negotiations with Georgia on its accession to the EU, citing democratic backsliding. [11]

The pro-Western Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili, has accused the Georgian government of "total falsification" of the vote during the 2024 Georgian parliamentary election. [11]

Hungary

Since 2010, Hungary under Viktor Orbán and his right-wing Fidesz party has been described as a prominent example of democratic backsliding. [12] [13] [14] [15] As in Poland, political interference by the legislative and executive branches of government threatens the institutional independence of the judiciary. [16] In 2012, the legislature abruptly lowered the age of retirement for judges from 70 to 62, forcing 57 experienced court leaders (including the President of the Supreme Court) to retire. [17] After the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that this decision violated EU laws relating to equality in the employment context, the government repealed the law and compensated the judges, but did not reinstate those forced to retire. [16] [18] [19] [20] The 2012 judiciary reform also centralized administration of the courts under the newly established National Judiciary Office, then headed by Tünde Handó (a lawyer married to a prominent member of Fidesz). [16] [17] Under Handó, the NJO also weakened the institutions of judicial self-governance, provoking what the European Association of Judges, Amnesty International, and the Hungarian Helsinki Committee describe as a "constitutional crisis" within the Hungarian judiciary. [21] Hungarian judges interviewed by Amnesty International also expressed concerns about attacks on the judiciary and individual judges by politicians and in the media. [16] The Hungarian government has dismissed criticism of its record on democracy issues. [22] [23]

According to the 2020 report of the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, Hungary had by 2019 become the first-ever EU member state to become an authoritarian regime. [24] On Freedom House's annual report, Hungary's democracy rating dropped for ten consecutive years. [25] Its classification was downgraded from "democracy" to "transitional or hybrid regime" in 2020; Hungary was also the first EU member state to be labeled "partially free" (in 2019). The organization's 2020 report states that "Orbán's government in Hungary has similarly dropped any pretense of respecting democratic institutions". [26] [27] A 2018 article published in the Journal of Democracy also described Hungary as a hybrid regime. [25] Recently Hungary also backslid in its view regarding LGBT rights in Hungary, creating a bill similar to the Section 28 bill. [28]

In July 2021, leaked data acquired by the Pegasus Project suggested the Hungarian government may have used NSO Group's Pegasus spyware to target opposition journalists. [29] Hungarian officials acknowledged that they had purchased the spyware, but noted that they had received permission from either the courts or the Ministry of Justice in every case it was used. [30]

Montenegro

Freedom House reported in 2020 that Montenegro was no longer a democracy, but only a hybrid regime. [31] Shortly after that report was published, the opposition won the 2020 Montenegrin parliamentary election [32] and Zdravko Krivokapić was appointed to the office of Prime Minister. Đukanović himself was later unseated by opposition candidate Jakov Milatović in the 2023 Montenegrin presidential election. The 2024 V-Dem Democracy Report claimed Montenegro advanced to "non-ambiguous" electoral democracy. [33]

North Macedonia

Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski's VMRO-DPMNE government, which was in power from 2006 to 2016, has been described as engaging in democratic backsliding. [34] In 2015, Gruevski's Interior Minister and intelligence chief resigned after a scandal in which it was found the Macedonian government had wiretapped media outlets, the judiciary, prosecutors and political opponents. [35] Following Gruevski's departure from office as part of the Pržino Agreement, On 23 May 2018, Gruevski was sentenced to two years in prison for unlawfully influencing government officials in the purchase of a luxury bulletproof car. [36] He subsequently fled the country and was granted political asylum in Hungary. [37]

Poland

In the Polish case, the European Commission stated in December 2017 that in the two preceding years, the Parliament of Poland had adopted "13 laws affecting the entire structure of the justice system in Poland" with the "common pattern [that] the executive and legislative branches [were] systematically enabled to politically interfere in the composition, powers, administration, and functioning of the judicial branch." [38] In February 2020, Věra Jourová, Vice President of the European Commission for Values and Transparency, described the disciplining of judges in Poland as "no longer a targeted intervention against individual black sheep, similar to other EU member states, but a case of carpet bombing. ... This is no reform, it's destruction." [39] In late September 2020, 38 European and other law professors called on the President of the European Commission to take action in Poland, stating:

Polish authorities continue to openly abuse, harass and intimidate judges and prosecutors who are seeking to defend the rule of law. In addition, Polish authorities continue to openly defy the authority of the Court of Justice by refusing to follow its judgments. ... judges who are attempting to apply EU law are being threatened and punished while those who flaunt violations of EU law are being rewarded. ... The rule of law in Poland is not merely being attacked. It is being destroyed in plain sight. [40]

Following the 2023 parliamentary elections and appointment of Donald Tusk as prime minister there are indicators of a reverse trend towards democratisation. [41] [42]

Romania

The Social Democratic Party (PSD) has been repeatedly accused of democratic backsliding while in power in Romania, initially during the tenure of Prime Minister Victor Ponta, who led the country during the 2012 Romanian constitutional crisis, when Ponta engaged in several unconstitutional actions in an attempt to impeach President Traian Băsescu. [43] Ponta's conduct was criticized by the European Union and the United States. [44]

Ponta was accused of restricting voting among the Romanian diaspora in the 2014 Romanian presidential election, during which Ponta was running as the PSD presidential candidate. [45] Following the election, which Ponta lost, his close ally, Sebastian Ghiță, was indicted for offering illegal incentives to Moldovans with Romanian citizenship to vote for Ponta. [46] Ghiță subsequently fled the country for Serbia, due to his good relationship with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić. [47] Ponta also left Romania for Serbia from 2016 to 2018, receiving Serbian citizenship and serving as an advisor to Vučic. [48]

After facing a corruption investigation in 2015, Ponta initially refused to resign as Prime Minister of Romania, prompting a political crisis. After the 2015 Romanian protests, Ponta ultimately resigned in November 2015. [49]

PSD leader Liviu Dragnea, who was accused of vote rigging during the 2012 Romanian presidential impeachment referendum, was ultimately convicted in 2015. [50] He was later indicted for abuse of office in 2016, preventing him from running for Prime Minister. [51]

In 2017, PSD Prime Minister Sorin Grindeanu's government passed new legislation decriminalising misconduct by officials, which was condemned by President Klaus Iohannis as a "day of mourning for the rule of law" in Romania. The legislation led to the 2017 Romanian protests. [52]

In 2019, Romania indicted Laura Codruța Kövesi, the former chief prosecutor of the National Anticorruption Directorate, who was running for European Chief Prosecutor at the time, leading EU authorities to condemn Romania for backsliding on the rule of law. Critics claimed that Romania's indictment of Kövesi was motivated by her indictment of numerous politicians, including Dragnea, on corruption charges. [53] Ponta, who had then become an opponent of Dragnea and the Romanian government after leaving the PSD, criticized the decision and described the PSD as increasingly "Fidesz-like", referring to the Hungarian ruling party. [54]

The European Commission and European Court of Justice Advocate-General have criticized Romania's 2020 judicial reforms, suggesting that they undermined the rule of law in the country. [55] [56] The PSD lost power after the 2020 Romanian legislative election, with the new government pledging to reverse the reforms to comply with the EU's Mechanism for Cooperation and Verification. [57]

After 2020 and especially after the 2021 political crisis, some sources claimed that president Klaus Iohannis' leadership has become increasingly illiberal, authoritarian, [58] [59] kleptocratic and corrupt. [60] [61]

In February 2025, a Romanian Constitutional Court judge described threats made against judges by ultranationalist presidential candidate Călin Georgescu as anti-democratic and dangerous. [62] The Court had annulled the results of the 2024 Romanian presidential election after Russian interference to promote Georgescu. [63]

Russia

Under Putin's leadership, Russia has turned into an authoritarian state. Vladimir Putin (08-03-2024) (cropped).jpg
Under Putin's leadership, Russia has turned into an authoritarian state.

Under over two decades of Vladimir Putin's leadership, the Russian Federation has experienced major democratic backsliding. Putin became acting President of Russia with the resignation of Boris Yeltsin in 1999, and then full President in the 2000 Russian presidential election, and he was able to use "public and elite dissatisfaction with the instability of the 1990s" to consolidate power in his hands, while overseeing a decade of economic growth. [64] The centralization of power under Putin weakened the power of the Federal Assembly, and led to a return to more autocratic rule seen during the Soviet Union. In the late 1990s during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, Freedom House gave Russia a score of 4 (out of 7; 1 meaning rights are fully protected, 7 meaning they are fully violated) for "freedom, civil liberties and political rights". [65]

Following subsequent de-democratization, experts do not generally consider Russia to be a democracy, citing purges and jailing of the regime's political opponents, curtailed press freedom, and the lack of free and fair elections. An example of the jailing of the regime's political opponents came most recently after the 2021 Russian protests when Alexei Navalny was arrested and sent to a penal colony and since then his Anti-Corruption Foundation has been deemed an extremist organization. [66] In 2021 more journalists and news outlets were declared foreign agents, with Russian TV channel Dozhd added to that list. [67] The Freedom House then in 2021 gave Russia a score of 20/100 and described it as not free. After serving 17 years as president, Putin, in 2021, signed a law allowing him to run in two more elections, potentially keeping him in power until 2036 [68] with the 2020 amendments to the Constitution of Russia, leaving little constraint on his power. [64] Putin's 2012 "foreign agents law" targeted NGOs and furthered the crackdown on internal dissent. [64]

Scholars differ in their perspectives on the significance of post-1998 democratic backsliding in Russia under Putin. [69] Some view Russia's 1990s-era trend toward European-style democratization as fundamentally an ephemeral aberration, with Russia's subsequent democratic backsliding representing a return to its "natural" historical course. [69] The opposite perspective is that the democratic decline under Putin would be a relatively short-term episode in Russian history: "From this perspective, Russia after 1991 was back on the path to Europe after the seventy-year interruption represented by communism", and "that path was inevitably to be bumpy and subject to setbacks." [69]

Serbia

Freedom House's annual Nations in Transit report in 2020 reported that, due to democratic backsliding, Serbia was no longer a democracy but had instead become a hybrid regime (in the "gray zone" between "democracies and pure autocracies"). [70] [31] The report cited "years of increasing state capture, abuse of power, and strongman tactics employed" by Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić. [31]

The 2018–2020 Serbian protests were in-part aimed at opposing "growing authoritarian rule" under Vučić. [71] Most opposition parties subsequently boycotted the 2020 Serbian parliamentary election, with OSCE observers saying "the pervasive influence of the ruling parties gave them undue advantage". [72] [73]

The OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights and Serbian NGOs reported election irregularities in the 2023 Serbian parliamentary election to the advantage of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, leading to the 2023 Serbian election protests. [74]

Slovakia

The tenure of Vladimír Mečiar as Slovak Prime Minister and President in the 1990s after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia has been described by political scientists Elisabeth Bakke and Nick Sitter as a period of democratic backsliding, due to Mečiar's control over state media and centralisation of executive power. [75]

Widespread protests in 2018 following the murder of Ján Kuciak have been described by some scholars as "helping to stave off democratic backsliding" by causing the resignation of Robert Fico, who served as Prime Minister from 2006 to 2010 and 2012 to 2018. [76] However, Bakke and Sitter have disputed allegations of democratic backsliding against Fico, noting that Fico often emphasized "his commitment to pluralistic democracy", which contrasted with the Polish and Hungarian leadership during that time period and Slovakia under Mečiar. [3]

Following Fico's 2023 return to power, he enacted judicial reforms, including the dissolution of the anti-corruption Special Prosecutor's Office, in what has been described as democratic backsliding. [77] This caused protests and prompted the European Parliament and the European Commission to express concerns about the state of rule of law in Slovakia. [78] Further protests ensued in 2024 after Fico's Culture Minister, Martina Šimkovičová of the nationalist Slovak National Party, dismissed the heads of two key Slovak cultural institutions, the Slovak National Gallery and the Slovak National Theatre, and dissolved the Slovak national broadcaster RTVS and replaced it with a new one, STVR. [79]

Slovenia

Prime Minister Janez Janša was criticised by Žiga Faktor of the EUROPEUM Institute for European Policy for overseeing democratic backsliding in Slovenia. Faktor claimed that Janša had aligned Slovenia closely with Hungary, denied journalists access to information during the COVID-19 pandemic, and had expanded his Slovenian Democratic Party's influence over the country's media with Hungarian financial support. [80]

Janša left office in June 2022, following his defeat in the 2022 Slovenian parliamentary election by the Freedom Movement leader Robert Golob, who entered politics to stop democratic backsliding in Slovenia. [81]

Ukraine

Several Ukrainian governments have faced accusations of democratic backsliding.

Prior to the removal of President Viktor Yanukovych in the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, Ukraine was described by political scientist Eleanor Knott as experiencing democratic backsliding and "soft authoritarianism". [82]

The Atlantic Council's Maxim Eristavi claimed in 2017 that "Ukrainian democracy is in danger" following President Petro Poroshenko's attempts to arrest his former ally and opposition figure Mikheil Saakashvili, and calls by Poroshenko's party for criminal investigations into another political opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko. [83]

In early 2021, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy drew criticism for democratic backsliding from members of the U.S. House of Representatives following Zelenskyy's firing of a pro-reform cabinet and the resignation of former National Bank of Ukraine Governor Yakiv Smolii. [84] Melinda Haring of the Atlantic Council stated that the Constitutional Court of Ukraine's removal of authority from the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption risked putting the country "on the edge of a major constitutional crisis" and criticized Zelenskyy's attempts to reform the Ukrainian judiciary as "ineffectual". [85]

United Kingdom

Human Rights Watch has accused the government of Boris Johnson of democratic backsliding, citing the illegal suspension of Parliament during the Brexit negotiations to prevent scrutiny, its appointments to important Parliamentary committees, and the Parliament of the United Kingdom being cut out of the rule-making process during the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside the government attempting to water down the powers of independent courts and having "pilloried" the legal profession, pushing for "de facto immunity for torture and war crimes committed by British troops overseas", and attempting to restrict the access of certain media outlets to press briefings. [86] The Constitution Unit of University College London also released articles warning of democratic backsliding after Johnson's government unveiled new bills in the 2021 State Opening of Parliament, [87] [88] some of which were passed into law. For example, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts bill (passed into law on 28 April 2022) has been criticized for restricting the right to protest. Johnson resigned after the Partygate scandal, although his Conservative Party remained in power in government until 2024.

The Public Order Act 2023, building on the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Act (PCSCA), restricted the right to freedom of assembly under the Human Rights Act 1998 and ECHR. It was introduced just before the King Charles III's Coronation in 2023 to try and combat anti-monarchy protests, led by pressure group Republic, by extending police powers to execute stop and search. However, this was widely condemned by human rights groups. Pressure group, Liberty, took the Home Office to the High Court over the legislation in 2024 on the grounds that the regulation was unlawful. [89] However, the Court ruled that the Act was not ultra vires. [90]

LGBTQ rights have also come under threat given increasing polarisation in the 21st Century. A report published by Stonewall in 2018 found that 13% of the LGBTQ community have experienced healthcare discrimination. With a further 14% avoiding healthcare treatment in fear of discrimination. [91] In 2024, former Prime Minister Liz Truss (2022-2022), introduced a Private Members bill aimed at securing further regulation for hormone therapy to those under the age of 18 and restricting the right for transgender people to socially transition whilst at school. [92] However, this bill was never enacted as Liz Truss lost her seat in the 2024 General Election.

Turnout at UK General Elections has been decreasing since 1950, when the highest ever turnout was recorded at 83.9%. [93] Turnout at the 2024 General Election was just 59.7%. [94]

The Freedom House's annual Freedom in the world report deemed the UK as a free country, with a score of 91/100 [95] for political rights and civil liberties. [96] However, this is a reduction of two points; down from 93/100 in 2023.

See also

References

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