Economic Dissatisfaction and Challenges to Liberal Political Order in Central and Eastern Europe

The paper starts with the presupposition that the rising strength of illiberal political actors in Central and Eastern European countries does not just represent a crisis of democracy or democratic backsliding, but rather that these developments pose a wholesale challenge to liberal democratic order, liberal economic system, and liberal institutions underpinning them. The paper posits that challenges to liberal democracy develop in a context where dissatisfaction with politics and economics, heightened by crisis, is used by illiberal political actors as a foundation for political mobilization of voters aimed at the wholesale change of the political and economic system. This includes changes in the distribution of economic power within a society, which necessarily presupposes reduction of power of independent institutions protecting property rights and conducting economic policy in a liberal market economy, most notably constitutional courts, judiciary, and independent central banks as well as independent regulatory agencies. To effect these changes, independent media and civil society organizations also need to be subdued or restricted to reduce criticism of these policies, but also to change the terms of the public debate in the long run. To enable this development, illiberal political actors need to develop an ideology which would be internally homogenizing and delegitimizing of the external and internal critique. This paper has two objectives. The first objective is to map political developments in CEE countries within the described framework. The second is to investigate whether crisis affected public opinion and created conditions which enables electoral ascendance of illiberal parties, most notably in terms of how citizens view democracy, market economy and the interaction between the two.