Crisis, 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 change of the political system which enables redistribution of economic power in society. This 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 de-legitimizing to the external and internal critique. This paper has two objectives. The first is, focusing on developments in CEE countries, to identify conditions favorable for the emergence of illiberal politics (or absence of it) and taking of power by illiberal political actors. The second is to map how illiberal political actors use power to transform the national political system and economic model and how and to what end they seek to redistribute economic power.