Partisan Complicity in Democratic Backsliding

The EU’s responses to democratic backsliding reveal differential treatment. While the EU has reacted quite robustly to Poland’s recent illiberal turn, it has been much softer on Hungary. It even remains unclear what consequences Hungary will face now that the European Parliament decided on initiating an Article 7-procedure against Hungary. One explanation for this is that transnational partisan associations protect individual member parties even if they slide to autocracy, so long as they can gain something from it. The paradigmatic case is that of the European People’s Party (EPP) and the Hungarian governing party Fidesz: because Fidesz reliably delivers votes to the EPP, the latter tolerates its attack on democracy and the rule of law, and shields it from EU sanctions. This paper makes a conceptual contribution to the debate on democratic backsliding in the EU by analysing partisan alliances of this sort as being involved in “complicity in democratic backsliding.” A concept from legal and normative political theory, complicity consists in one agent contributing to another agent’s wrongdoing. If we are to fully understand what (if anything) may be problematic about it, close analysis is required. What exactly is complicity in democratic backsliding, and when and why is it blameworthy? The paper suggests a distinction between electoral alliances and ideational alliances and argues that the former species of alliances is normatively less problematic than the latter. The key to understanding this is that the extent to which the actor who is complicit in wrongdoing shares the intentions of the actor who is primarily responsible for the wrong makes an important different in evaluating the normative standing of complicity. On the whole, however, complicity in democratic backsliding is a normatively ambivalent phenomenon, since it is supported by, perhaps even a necessary implication of, shared partisan commitments, whose strong presence in the transnational realm is generally considered desirable in the EU.