In a tale of Eastern European democracy, all unhappy families are alike

CW: LGBTQ+ rights, homophobia

The first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina states what is often referred to as the Anna Karenina principle: ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ When it comes to democracy, in Eastern Europe there indeed seem to be a lot of unhappy families. Hungary, under the leadership of Victor Orban, is the only EU member classified as only a ‘partly free’ democracy. In Poland, the ruling Law and Justice party is moving towards a similar direction: free and independent media is under attack, the opposition are  painted as traitors and the country’s constitutional court is firmly under the control of the party. Tiny Slovenia’s prime minister is experimenting with media-targeted assaults and in Serbia Covid-19 is being used as justification for excessive restrictions on individual liberties and electoral cycle disruptions. The question is, however, are they really all unhappy in their own way? Are all these instances of democratic backsliding and shifts towards hybrid authoritarianism really unrelated and separate in origin?

The remarkable similarities between the countries’ transitions towards one or another version of ‘illiberal’, ‘flawed’ or ‘plebiscitarian’ democracy suggest a different version. In 2009 Victor Orban, head of Hungary’s right-wing populist Fidesz party declared that after a series of election losses it was time to create ‘a central political forcefield’ in the country. Only three years later, helped by the unprecedented election victory in 2010, a new Hungarian constitution, combined with official and semi-official reforms, entrenched Fidesz’s domination in the judicial system and the media. In 2014, the party secured the constitutional super-majority for the second time, with the electoral playing field fundamentally altered and boundaries between the Fidesz party and Hungarian state essentially erased. 

The same story continued in Poland, where Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the éminence grise of the right-wing, populist and fiercely socially conservative Law and Justice party, declared in 2011 that ‘a day will come when we have a Budapest in Warsaw’. The day came in 2015 when Law and Justice won the first full parliamentary majority in Poland’s post-communist history. It was not long before judicial reforms effectively eliminated constitutional checks and balances, party loyalists filled an astonishing portion of civil service jobs, and public broadcasters were turned into a mouthpiece of the ruling party. When the 2019 election came, Law and Justice comfortably received the highest vote share by any party since the country’s return to democracy in 1989.

The fate of Serbian democracy followed along similar lines and in Slovenia, it can be argued, the first steps of this transition to flawed democracy are starting to materialise. It is not even that important what the state in which these countries find themselves is called – although ‘flawed democracy’ seems to serve the purpose best. What really matters is that the quality of the democratic environment in Poland, Hungary, Serbia and Slovenia is deteriorating. The changes these countries went through are not in themselves remarkable. In fact, they broadly resemble what Larry Diamond, a leading American democratisation scholar, has identified as ‘autocrat’s twelve-step program,’  including the demonisation of opposition, control of the judiciary and breakdown of independent media. What is remarkable though, is that these instances of democratic backsliding were localized in a very particular region and very specific period of time. They occurred to the East of the former Iron Curtain, a couple of years after the 2009 financial crash and evolved during the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic.

To fully grasp how these similarities come into play, it is crucial to understand one thing: flawed democracy, no matter how quickly it comes about, never does so as a complete package. There is no bundle of measures that voters agree upon to approve a ‘hybrid regime’ or a ‘partly free’ democracy. There is no referendum on the abolishment of judiciary independence or sidelining of the NGOs. No party – not even Orban’s Fidesz and Kaczynski’s Law and Justice – include proposals to limit media freedom in their election manifestos. Instead, these changes come individually and societal support for them is gathered not as part of a complete, systematic package, but as support for individual ideas and measures. Poland’s crackdown of its constitutional court was motivated and carried out as an administrative reform, designed to eradicate the influence of former communist judges. And who, in a country whose darkest years have passed under the shadow of hammer and sickle, would disapprove of it? On the same note, the Law and Justice’s implementation of generous transfer payments to families with children and support for Poland’s infamous ‘LGBTQ-free zones’ are received well in a more conservative and rural east of the country. 

This is where the strength of these populist authoritarians lies. To come to power, they do not need to persuade all of the electorate to agree with them on all the measures. They only need to get part of the population to agree on some individual measures separately. And the more vulnerable the electorate is to populist proposals, the more disillusioned people are with the status quo, the easier it is for would-be-authoritarians to get to power and start the destructive work of transitioning towards flawed democracy. Democracy is vulnerable to such attacks if the electorate has less faith in the the parties, the civil servants, the government agencies, the politicians and the journalists which make up the system as a whole than they do in one political actor promising to fundamentally alter and change the system in the benefit of the people. The strength and vulnerability of democracy, in short, is about trust. 

And trust is the factor which Eastern Europe is lacking. As the Pew Global Attitudes survey highlights, social trust – beliefs about the trustworthiness of other people – is in decline in the region. However, the situation is much worse with another kind of trust, the institutional one. The fifty or so years which these countries spent as communist-ruled USSR satellite states has generated social environments in which trust in institutions was punished. Trusting party-controlled media would have led one to form ridiculously false beliefs about the state of reality. Trusting government institutions and being a dutiful citizen would have prevented one from reaping the rewards of the shadow economy, which flourished due to the crystal-clear shortcomings of the centrally planned one. Trusting one’s colleagues in work and expressing one’s beliefs about forbidden topics like failures of the state, life in the West or benefits of intellectual freedom could have resulted in job loss or, at worst, imprisonment. The communist societies of Poland, Hungary, Serbia and the USSR were societies characterised by the extreme hostility of citizens towards the state and everything related to it: courts, government agencies and politicians. In HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl there is one particularly illustrative scene. When Valery Legasov, a soviet scientist, testifies in court and speaks of ‘lies that practically define us’, he speaks not only about fatal design flaws in nuclear reactors. His speech is also a reflection on society which had lost something that makes it a society in the first place – trust.

Fifty years under authoritarian communist rule cannot pass without consequences. The effect of lack of institutional trust on the robustness of democracy is tragic. The whole democratic project, including parties, the media and NGOs, are significantly weakened and become more vulnerable to the attacks from populists who seek to paint them as flawed, illegitimate and not on the same side as the people. In healthy democracies, these attacks and political actors behind them are quickly identified and either refuted or ignored by most of the population. But where social trust is low, it is easy to sell one social group as scapegoats – “the liberals”, “gay people”, “the EU supporters” – and capitalise on these attacks on one’s way to power. 

The lack of trust also fuels other factors which make Eastern European democracies more vulnerable. One is growing urban-rural division: market-based reforms carried out in the 1990s unleashed the potential of cities and helped to generate a new, liberal and educated urban class, but resulted in slowly shrinking rural areas which are often poorer, less educated and more likely to support populist, socially conservative parties. In Hungary, Orban’s Fidesz was first elected mostly with the help of rural voters who were disillusioned with the previous socialist government. He carried on with the same support group ever since: those who distrust the “liberal values imposed by the EU” and those who are not educated enough to spot the manipulatory tactics used by the Fidesz-controlled press. These are the people whose faith in democracy as a project – all those gruelling discussions and government changes every four years  – was not high in the first place. In Poland, support for Law and Justice roughly divides the country into two parts – socially conservative rural East and liberal urban West. 

The would-be authoritarians of Eastern Europe also make use of its relatively weak social institutions. The media is not as strong or independent as in the West and twenty-or-so years of democracy is often not enough to establish well-followed precedents or evolved norms. However, the fact that the deterioration of the state of democracy was so quick and that societal divisions still exist in these countries means that there is some hope for the future of democracy in Europe’s east. In Poland, opposition parties control the Senate and, in the streets of Warsaw, Krakow, and other major cities, protests against the destruction of rule of law or the oppression faced by the LGBTQ community often erupt. In Hungary, the united opposition goes almost head-to-head with Orban’s Fidesz in opinion polls and, with parliament elections coming up in 2022, could pose a serious challenge to Orban for the first time in a decade. 

This hope is, unfortunately, fragile. The longer Law and Justice or Fidesz or Serbian Progressive Party stays in power, the tighter their informal and formal grab on state institutions will be. The fact that societies are divided means that it becomes more difficult for the opposition to build a unifying case. It can then rely only on its own support base in cities, and this base is, after all, limited. Finally, no matter what strategies opposition parties choose, the structural obstacles will still be there. A significant portion of the population in Eastern European countries will still lack explicit trust in democracy as a system, with all its imperfections, and instead will tend to fall for the promises of populist leaders. Eastern European democracies are likely to continue to look like a group of unhappy families, but unhappy in one, very specific way.

Image: European People’s Party/ CC BY 2.0 via Flickr