Toxic friend? The impact of the Russian invasion on democratic backsliding and PRR cooperation in Europe

Abstract

Following the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the ‘democratic backslider’ parties in Hungary (Fidesz) and Poland (Law and Justice) took differing stances on Russia, bringing their positions on the Rule of Law (RoL) conflict and within the broader alliance of Populist Radical Right (PRR) parties into question. Building on and advancing the theoretical framework of democratic backsliding and PRR party cooperation, this article assesses the impact of exogenous shocks triggered by external authoritarian actors on these types of collaborations. A detailed examination of the voting patterns of Fidesz, Law and Justice and other PRR parties in the European Parliament (EP) is undertaken, and their stances towards Russia and the RoL conflict before and after the invasion are weighed. The findings show that the invasion did not influence the dynamics of democratic backsliding. Despite the rhetoric, it actually brought Fidesz and Law and Justice closer together. While the attack led to a convergence of assertiveness towards Russia among the PRR parties, the Putin regime remains a divisive issue within the PRR family. The different positions towards Russia did not affect the support of PRRs for the backsliders.

Keywords:

• Russian invasion of Ukraine
• EU
• democratic backsliding
• Rule of Law conflict
• Populist Radical Right

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Simon Hix for sharing his Vote Watch EU team’s data on Roll Call Votes in EP9. We also want to thank two anonymous reviewers for West European Politics, Martin Portos, Irina Ciornei, Matthias Vom Hau, and Alexandros Tokhi, for their valuable comments. We would also like to thank the participants of the panel ‘Emerging Tensions in the European Union’ during the 28^th International Conference of Europeanists in Lisbon in July 2022 for discussing an early version of this paper. Finally, we thank Mercédes Mária Lajos for her research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The PRR party label (Mudde 2007) usually includes the political groups in the EP right of the mainstream, such as the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) and their affiliated national parties until 2019 (Falkner and Plattner 2020) or the ECR and Identity and Democracy (ID) Party Group after 2019. See also Rooduijn et al. (2019).

2 To date, backsliding regimes in the EU have been based on one-party rule (Hungary) or a coalition with a majoritarian party having the final say (Poland – Law and Justice/PiS within the United Right). Therefore, this article uses the terms "backsliding parties" and "backsliding governments" as synonyms.

3 Episodes of democratic backsliding have also been identified in EU member states such as Romania (Iusmen 2015), the Czech Republic (Hanley and Vachudova 2018) and Bulgaria (Rone 2023).

4 The first links can be found in 1993, when the National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, sought to establish ties with the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), led by far-right politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky (Mudde 2007).

5 Even though the use of roll-call voting data in the EP has been criticised due to a possible selection bias, as they constitute only about one-third of all votes cast in the EP (Carrubba et al. 2006), scholars see this caveat as exaggerated. For example, Hix (2002: 693) argues that there is no “empirical evidence to prove that roll-call voting is systematically biased towards a particular EP party or set of issues." Following this argumentation, we assume these votes produce a reasonably accurate picture of voting behaviour in the EP.

6 The votes in favour are mainly related to the human rights situation in Russia (particularly the case of Aleksei Navalny), the situation in Belarus (after the elections and during the migration crisis on the Polish border), the EU Association Agreement with Ukraine, the direction of EU-Russia political relations, the foreign interference in democratic processes in the EU, and to Russian aggression in Ukraine. The votes against are primarily amendments proposed by the Left, particularly by the Irish MEPs Clare Daly and Mick Wallace, in which sanctions against Russia and the EU’s interference in third countries (Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine) are criticised.

7 Most of these votes were related to the ongoing hearings regarding article 7(1), the risk of a severe breach of the Rule of Law in Poland and Hungary (but also Bulgaria), the EU mechanism on Democracy, Rule of Law and Fundamental Rights and the Rule of Law conditionality.

8 We do not have a conclusive explanation for this decrease in assertiveness in PiS and Vox. These parties certainly parted from the most assertive party positions among those analysed here. Thus, they remain strongly assertive after the invasion. One explanation for the case of PiS is that the response of the EU to the Russian invasion might be insufficient in the eyes of PiS MEPs.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adam Holesch

Adam Holesch is a post-doctoral fellow at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals. He analyses European politics by going up and down the ladder of multi-level governance, focussing on democratic backsliding, the rule of law conflict, regionalism and global governance. He has published, among others, in the journals Journal of European Integration; Territory, Politics and Governance; Acta Politica; East European Politics and Global Governance. [[email protected]]

Piotr Zagórski

Piotr Zagórski is a post-doc at SWPS University in Warsaw. He holds a PhD degree from the Autonomous University of Madrid. His research interests include political behaviour, historical legacies, and populist parties. He has published in Government and Opposition, Political Studies Review, and East European Politics and Societies. [[email protected]]