Decline of Democracy and Good Governance in East-Central Europe: Populist Democracy as Electoral Autocracy in Hungary

With the decline of democracy in East-Central Europe (ECE) the international political science has discussed how to call and assess these “hybrid” forms between democracy and authoritarianism. This paper applies the term and concept of “populist democracy” (Pappas, 2014) to the ECE case and considers that the Hungarian developments give the worst case scenario in the ECE comparative analysis. There have been “critical elections” in all ECE states separating the first generation of party systems from their second generation. Beyond the mainstream parties, four types of parties have appeared in these elections, namely the Eurosceptic, protest and extreme rightist parties, but first of all the new kind of populist parties that may be termed as “populism from above”. Although the first three types of parties are also very important - with their overlapping features – in the present, second generation party systems in ECE, the paper argues that still this new kind of populist parties gives the key for the understanding of declining ECE democracies as “populist democracies”. Based on the overview of the comparative critical elections in ECE, this paper focuses on the Hungarian worst case scenario as moving from the stage of the semi-authoritarian system to that of electoral autocracy after the 2014 elections. This populism from above has a paradox, since it has been based on the permanent anti-elitist negative campaign of the newly emerged politico-business elite. This has recently appeared in the hate campaign against the migrants as a claim by this new elite “protecting the country and Europe as a whole” during the refugee crisis. Recent publication: Ágh, Attila (2015b) “The Transformation of the Hungarian Party System: From the Democratic Chaos to the Electoral Autocracy”, Südosteuropa, Special Issue, Hungary’s Path Toward an Illiberal System, Vol. 63, No. 2, 201-222