Illiberal Coalitions in the European Union: The Case of Hungary and Poland

Poland and Hungary are the only EU member states to date against which the EU triggered Art. 7 TEU proceedings. Apparently, both reached a level of democratic backsliding that is considered as intolerable by the EU. In our article, we ask why did these two countries go furthest in democratic backsliding? This question becomes even more puzzling if put in a comparative perspective: Hungary and Poland do not share some obvious commonalities, which other countries in this region would lack. If anything, both states were the frontrunners of post-Communist democratization. We argue that the answer lies not in some conditions or variables that Poland and Hungary share, but rather, in actions. We show how Poland and Hungary were the first ones to build an illiberal coalition in Europe through long-term coordinated efforts driven by Hungarian and Polish conservative politicians. The purpose of this paper is to show how this alliance has contributed to democratic backsliding and how it cross-fertilized the developments in both Hungary and Poland. This paper builds on and advances the growing literature on democratic backsliding. Single case studies and comparative approaches, especially on the most extreme cases of Poland and Hungary, constitute an important part of this literature, which is in large part diagnostic: it seeks to show what democratic backsliding looks like and how it unfolds. However valuable, this case-by-case logic is less well placed to capture dynamic processes of cross-national emulation, diffusion and strategizing. The coordinated nature of the illiberal projects launched in Poland and Hungary has not, to the best of our knowledge, been subject to systematic analysis until now, which is a research gap that we seek to fill. The article proceeds as follows: first, we discuss the major political developments in the two countries during the Fidesz (2010-2019) and PiS (2015-2019) governments, showcasing striking similarities as well as some context-specific differences. Subsequently, we reconstruct the development of the bilateral relation from 2004 (starting shortly before EU accession) up to 2019 (a few weeks after the Art. 7 sanction procedure was triggered against Hungary) and ask what were the stable fundaments for this relation. In terms of data and method, we rely on process tracing using a hand-coded data set based on more than 800 press articles that appeared in right-wing newspapers in both countries. Our findings show that conservatives in Hungary and Poland engaged in systematic linkage-building over the past decade that partly overlapped but also went beyond the activities of the Visegrád Group group. We argue that this alliance has been instrumental for the illiberal projects launched by the Hungarian and Polish governments, which used it for various ends: as a model to emulate, a means of legitimation, and a bargaining chip in the EU context. The originality of our paper lies not only in the identification of a new mechanism, which contributes to explaining democratic backsliding but also in describing a new type of behavior within the EU framework, which has important consequences for the EU and democracy more generally.