Understanding the illiberal turn: democratic backsliding in the Czech Republic

Abstract

Democratic backsliding in Central Europe has so far been most acute in Hungary and Poland, states once considered frontrunners in democratisation. In this paper, we explore to what extent developments in another key frontrunner, the Czech Republic, fit initial patterns of Hungarian/Polish backsliding. Our analysis centres on the populist anti-corruption ANO movement, led by the billionaire Andrej Babiš, which became the largest Czech party in October 2017 after winning parliamentary elections. We find that while ANO has more limited electoral support than illiberal governing parties in Poland and Hungary and lacks a powerful nationalist narrative, common tactics and forms of concentrating power can be identified, albeit with crucial differences of timing and sequencing.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 353 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.