From the re-election of Viktor Orban as prime minister in Hungary this month to Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, it’s easy to conclude that the outlook for democracy in Eastern Europe is bleak. But while the creeping authoritarianism in Hungary – and similar if less extreme problems in Poland – is real and cause for deep concern, it has also overshadowed a wave of democratic consolidation unfolding in the rest of Eastern Europe. East.
Over the past three years, a string of liberal election victories in the region have gone largely unnoticed. Far from being a passing phase, a wide variety of factors – from an emboldened European Union to generational replacement – suggest that this democratic consolidation will only continue. Even with Orban, the future of Eastern Europe is liberal.
This most recent wave of democratic consolidation began in earnest with Slovakia’s 2019 presidential race, when liberal reformer and environmental activist Zuzana Caputova became the country’s first female leader. Caputova came to power following outrage over the 2018 murder of a prominent Slovak journalist, whose assassination implicated the then-ruling illiberal party Direction-Slovak Social Democracy (known as Smer -SD). Caputova capitalized on the outrage to defeat the party’s candidate with 58% of the vote, and Slovaks still punished the party in the country’s 2020 parliamentary election. Smer had the potential to turn into full-fledged authoritarianism, but the Slovaks blocked him before he could.
From the re-election of Viktor Orban as prime minister in Hungary this month to Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, it’s easy to conclude that the outlook for democracy in Eastern Europe is bleak. But while the creeping authoritarianism in Hungary – and similar if less extreme problems in Poland – is real and cause for deep concern, it has also overshadowed a wave of democratic consolidation unfolding in the rest of Eastern Europe. East.
Over the past three years, a string of liberal election victories in the region have gone largely unnoticed. Far from being a passing phase, a wide variety of factors – from an emboldened European Union to generational replacement – suggest that this democratic consolidation will only continue. Even with Orban, the future of Eastern Europe is liberal.
This most recent wave of democratic consolidation began in earnest with Slovakia’s 2019 presidential race, when liberal reformer and environmental activist Zuzana Caputova became the country’s first female leader. Caputova came to power following outrage over the 2018 murder of a prominent Slovak journalist, whose assassination implicated the then-ruling illiberal party Direction-Slovak Social Democracy (known as Smer -SD). Caputova capitalized on the outrage to defeat the party’s candidate with 58% of the vote, and Slovaks still punished the party in the country’s 2020 parliamentary election. Smer had the potential to turn into full-fledged authoritarianism, but the Slovaks blocked him before he could.
This wave continued with the 2020 presidential election in Moldova, when Maia Sandu, another liberal reformer who, like Caputova, became her country’s first female leader with almost 58% of the vote, came to power. . Sandu triumphed over incumbent President Igor Dodon, a Kremlin-backed candidate who has visited Moscow no less than 20 times in the run-up to elections. (Russian President Vladimir Putin even wished Dodon Good luck). Moldova continued its realignment with the West in its 2021 parliamentary elections, when Sandu’s Liberal Action and Solidarity Party won the absolute majority in parliament needed to implement meaningful reform.
This wave of liberalism accelerated last year, when voters elected two liberal leaders in Bulgaria and deposed an autocrat in the Czech Republic. In Bulgaria, it took three general elections in the space of seven months to end the 12-year rule of (now former) Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, whose legendary corruption culminated in leaked photos of the 62-year-old. years lying naked in bed surrounded by rolls of euros. Borissov was not pro-Russian, but his corrupt governance and kleptocracy made Bulgaria an exception in the European Union. In his place are Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov and Deputy Prime Minister Assen Vassilev, two Harvard University-educated reformers who seem well-placed to reduce corruption, boost democratic standards and steer Bulgaria in a decisive direction. liberal.
The fall of Andrej Babis, the former autocratic Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, was even more dramatic. Babis seemed poised to take the Czech Republic down Hungary’s path, replicating Orban’s playbook of stacking independent institutions with cronies, squeezing out independent media and railing against immigrants. Tellingly, Orban even launched the electoral campaign for Babis, framing his campaign within the framework of a common struggle against the European Union. The subsequent loss of Babis, spurred in part by the Pandora Papers and revelations of his own corruption, put an end to the idea that the Czech Republic would follow in the autocratic footsteps of its near neighbour.
Hungary and Poland, for good reason, continued to dominate the headlines. But the election of liberal reformers in Slovakia, Moldova and Bulgaria, coupled with the removal of an emerging autocrat in the Czech Republic, are tangible victories for democracy in Eastern Europe that have gone largely unnoticed.
These liberalizing trends are expected to prevail over the next decade, in part because of the gradual replacement of older, more conservative generations by younger, more liberal generations. Apart from a few exceptions where young people are more conservative (namely Hungary), this trend is evident in almost all Eastern European countries. In the Czech Republic, for example, only 13% of voters under 35 voted for ANO 2011, the populist and kleptocratic party of the Babis. Meanwhile, Moldova’s large and overwhelmingly young diaspora gave Sandu 93% of their votes, which was most of their margin of victory.
Even in illiberal countries, the trends are clear. The 2020 Polish presidential election, for example, saw Andrzej Duda, an illiberal aligned with law and justice, pass with 51% of the vote. But he lost voters aged 18 to 29 by a remarkable 28.8 points, suggesting that Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party will struggle as today’s young voters make up a larger share of the electorate. Perversely, COVID-19 has accelerated this trend by disproportionately killing older, rural, vaccine-skeptical voters who form the base of illiberal parties like Law and Justice in Poland and Smer in Slovakia.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is also likely to accelerate liberalisation. Some of the millions of Ukrainians who have fled to neighboring countries may stay, exerting an anti-Kremlin effect on foreign policy in a way that is no different from Cuban Americans in the United States. In most countries (though perhaps not in Poland, where the illiberal Law and Justice party is already staunchly anti-Russian), this could have a liberal effect, since voting against Russia necessarily means voting against the many parties in Russia. extreme right associated with it. And the invasion has emboldened the cause of democracy and the rule of law within the European Union, whose creation of a new independent and centralized European Public Prosecutor’s Office last year seems well placed to finally crack down on the corruption. Above all, the invasion has created a stark contrast between Russian autocracy and European liberalism, galvanizing reformers who advocate closer ties with the West and punishing reactionaries who wish to mirror the Kremlin.
This is not a clear effect: the invasion appears to have strengthened Orban’s hand in Hungary, largely because Orban took advantage of the Fidesz party’s near-total control over the media to falsely claim that the opposition would drag Hungary into war against Russia. But Hungary, ranked by Freedom House as the least free country in the EU, is a particularly poor predictor of how other countries will react. And in any case, the long-term trajectory of Eastern Europe – and the mere existence of free and fair elections in countries hidden behind the iron curtain just 30 years ago – is one which should give the Liberals hope. After Orban’s re-election, Hungary could sink further into authoritarianism. But the rest of Eastern Europe will not follow.
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