Democratic backsliding in the European Union: the role of the Hungarian-Polish coalition

ABSTRACT

Combining the insights of EU-specific research on backsliding and coalitions with the literature on the international collaboration of autocrats, we argue that right-wing political leadership in Hungary and Poland have coalesced to advance their respective projects of democratic backsliding. We identify three distinct but intertwined uses of the coalition: (1) mutual protection afforded within the supranational arena aimed at limiting the EU's sanctioning capacities; (2) learning in the form of transfer of democratic backsliding policies; and (3) domestic legitimation. Three factors have driven coalescence patterns: intersecting interests, ideological proximity, and the EU’s decision rules regarding sanctions.

KEYWORDS:

• Democratic backsliding
• European Union
• coalition
• Poland
• Hungary
• rule of law

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Matthias vom Hau, Visnja Vukov, Borge Wietzke, Andrea Cassani and Marcin Barański for commenting on previous versions of this article. We are also thankful to the participants of the workshop “Democratic Backsliding in Europe: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives” held at Sciences Po in Paris in December 2019 and the participants of the panel “Democratic Backsliding in the EU: Causes and Impact” at the ECPR General Conference in Wrocław in September 2019.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Although both PiS and Fidesz govern in alliance, (the former with the Christian Democratic People’s Party [KDNP] and the latter within the United Right), due to the marginal impact of the coalition partners, our research refers primarily to PiS and Fidesz.

2 Comparison with other newspapers showed that the coverage of Polish-Hungarian relations in the time-period of interest was more extensive in the right-leaning press.

3 The material provided in this article, if not accessible in English, has been translated from the Hungarian and Polish originals by the authors. These examples are fully referenced, but the authors can provide access to the rest of the data upon request. On few occasions we have also included evidence outside of this delineated set of texts, either when citing a foreign leader or a well-publicized and widely known statement.

4 While some authors point out that PiS “copied” Fidesz’s project of democratic backsliding (e.g. Kelemen and Orenstein 2016), empirically proving that learning has indeed occurred is not as straightforward. It is possible to conflate learning with isomorphism, i.e., similar actors doing similar things because this is the “optimal” way for achieving their goals using similar rhetoric to legitimize these actions.

5 Interestingly, Orbán had characterized PiS’s 2005 victory as an “outline and a script” for Hungary (Magyar Hírlap, January 18, 2006, p.7).

6 The changes of the judicial system went way further in Poland than in Hungary. The PiS government introduced a disciplinary system against critical judges in 2018, followed by the controversial “Muzzle Law” in 2020, which allows for punishing Polish judges if they question the government’s judicial reforms, ask the European Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling, or even make public statements.

7 In this paper we do not assess how legitimating claims and gestures that target the general population are actually received.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adam Holesch

Adam Holesch is a post-doctoral fellow at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI) and an Adjunct Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He is also the Project Manager of the H2020 – Project GLOBE – “Global Governance and the European Union: Future Trends and Scenarios”. His research follows an interdisciplinary approach mixing insights from Political Theory, Comparative Politics and Political Economy, studying about all questions of nationalism, regionalism and the European Union. He has published in edited volumes with Routledge and Nomos. He has also written two books on German-Polish relations.

Anna Kyriazi

Anna Kyriazi is a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Milan in the context of the SOLID project. She holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute. Her research interests are comparative politics, migration and political communication with particular emphasis on Eastern and Southern Europe. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals (JEMS, Ethnicities) and edited volumes (Cambridge UP, Routledge).