Democracy’s Retreat in Eastern Europe

Sebastian Kurz, Chancellor of Austria. Andrzej Duda, President of Poland. Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary. These men are among the most powerful and recognizable figures of Eastern Europe's revolt against liberal and social democracy. Their ruling political parties, like Poland’s PiS (Law and Justice) and Fidesz in Hungary, remain a constant thorn in the European Union’s (EU) side for their relentless crusades against Brussels politicians, who are portrayed as distant, uncaring bureaucrats out to trample over the rights of smaller continental nations. Exploiting the effects of the 2015 migrant crisis on Germany and France, leaders like Orban and Duda have done great damage to the EU’s attempts at negotiating a universal agreement on refugees and on the whole can be seen as symptoms of an anti-democratic plague rapidly spreading across Europe.

Red, white, and undemocratic

In Poland, the rejection of democracy has manifested itself in a constitutional crisis between the ruling government and the supposedly independent judiciary. PiS’s passage of a law mandating that Supreme Court justices above a certain age retire was intended to force the resignation of around two-thirds of the presiding justices, including its president, Malgorzata Gersdorf. And since the government has the power to nominate new justices, the “purge” of the country’s top judges would have shattered the legal and political independence that the judiciary enjoys.

However, a ruling by the Court of Justice—the highest judicial body in Europe—ordered the Polish government to reverse the law and end its assault on the Supreme Court’s autonomy. Top PiS officials have avowed their intent to disregard the court ruling and continue with their attacks on the judiciary. Protests have erupted time after time against the government’s actions, but they seem to have no effect on President Duda and his cabinet. But perhaps the most significant gesture of defiance is the simple fact that Ms. Gersdorf still shows up for work.

Orban legend

Poland’s constitutional crisis is just one expression of the struggles that liberal democratic values have faced in Eastern Europe. All over the region, populist leaders invoke fears of migrant hordes waiting outside their nations’ borders and of out-of-touch EU bureaucrats doing everything in their power to trample over the rights of smaller countries. The most prominent example of such demagoguery is Hungary’s Viktor Orban. One of the most influential politicians in Europe’s array of right-wing parties, Orban has served as the main opposition to the mainstream Brussels establishment.

His party, Fidesz, was initially founded in the late 1980s as a youth movement to oppose the Soviet domination of Hungary, aiming to fight against the puppet government that the Russians had installed. During these early forays into politics, Orban distinguished himself as one of the leading anti-communist figures in Europe. For a time, his willingness to work with western liberal democracies and his promotion of free-market capitalism helped to assure the world that after the breakup of the Soviet Union, authoritarianism, along with nationalist rhetoric, was on its way out.

Considering this, Viktor Orban’s conversion from pro-democracy celebrity politician to hardline national conservative has been nothing short of astonishing. His recent attacks on migrants and promotion of nationalist rhetoric have confirmed that Orban’s rigid ideology represents a genuine opposition to large-scale European unity. The 2015 migrant crisis predominantly affected France, Germany, and Italy, but its negative effects were cleverly utilized by Orban to demonstrate the weaknesses of liberal democracy.

The way forward

The EU must show that it is willing and able to uphold its mission of supporting open, free, and democratic governments across the continent. Sanctions against member nations would do far more harm than good; Brussels must not risk the offending countries leaving the union. Neither would forcing a universal refugee policy on Europe work, as the political ramifications of such attempts have shown. Calls for a “true European army”—as Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel, the leaders of France and Germany respectively, put it—serve only to increase fears and speculation about the importance of the voices of smaller countries in the union’s policies. The EU was founded to end conflict between nations, and the only way to achieve this is to lessen the influence of larger countries over policies that affect all of Europe.

The solution to this widespread disillusion among weaker countries is to bring more of them to the negotiating table. Politicians like Duda and Orban were able to gain such widespread support for their Euroscepticism because of the unwillingness of the EU itself to bring in weaker countries to work out viable compromises on key issues, like the modern economic crises in Italy and Greece. The 2015 refugee controversy captured the international media’s attention for months for two main reasons. One was the sheer scale of the situation: hundreds of thousands of displaced persons arriving on European lands all at once greatly strained the infrastructure of the affected nations. The second and more significant reason was the seemingly unending inaction on the part of the EU to find a solution to the crisis. France and Germany essentially attempted to strong-arm smaller nations into adopting their migration policies by opening their borders to refugees. This led to great diplomatic pushback, particularly in Eastern Europe, as traditionally conservative governments denounced the pressures to open their borders as an attack on their national sovereign rights. As Viktor Orban himself put it, “You wanted the migrants; we didn’t.” Leaders of resisting governments encouraged the other countries of Europe to resist the changes. Their rhetoric worked: Austria declared its borders closed to migrants in 2017.

The European Union is now in the most danger it has been since the Schengen Area nearly ripped itself apart during the euro crisis of 2009. Germany and France can no longer assume that the union’s member nations will always follow their lead. They must ensure that each step of the process—along with healing diplomatic ties and resolving conflicts over policy—is democratic, stable, and reasonable. Dismissing Orban and his allies as right-wing upstarts to be voted out of office come next election is no longer a viable view. Instead, European countries must work out common economic, social, and political goals that they can each take steps to achieve.

Organizing more and larger summits among all European nations would ensure that every government has a voice in continental politics and would also have the effect of pacifying rebellious member nations. This might lead to a detente between Brussels and the various Eurosceptic governments of Eastern Europe and increase economic and political cooperation among the EU countries. The dominance of Western and Central European nations over EU policy must end in order to resolve the tension with Eastern Europe.