Near Miss Democracy: Unelected Officials vs. Civil Resistance

Interestingly, most clear examples of democratic backsliding – such as Hungary, Poland and Turkey – are not liberal democracies (Scheppele, 2018). Yet the sub-group of charismatic leaders using democratic elections to rise into power and then attempt to change the structure of checks and balances encompasses both authoritarian regimes like Russia and liberal democracies like the USA. While Scheppele, but also Levitsky and Zibllat (2019), are looking for the mechanisms of taking control over democracy, Urbinati (2019) focuses on the ideological process by which such leaders conceptualize their entitlement to being in power. Urbinati calls this phenomenon Populism in Power. One of the features of populism in power is almost a perpetual election scene. Judging from the club of world leaders Israel’s Prime-minister Netanyahu has identified himself with and used in his endless campaign over five electoral cycles 2019-22, we find Trump, Putin, Orbán, Modi and Bolsonaro. Far from being merely symbols of power, these leaders acted as members of a ruling club, with learning processes and shared ideas transmuting among them. This paper addresses the sub-group of Populism in Power which is also a near-miss democracy. A true near-miss democracy, write Ginzburg and Huk (2018), is a democracy which was "under severe threat but survives intact". Could Trump’s loss of the election, and Poland’s new government suggest a regime change may be avoided? Israel 2023 underwent an alleged rapid and severe constitutional coup d’état which threatened to enact a change of regime from a liberal ethno-democracy to an autocratic populist one. Following Viktor Orbán’s declaration that “We have replaced a shipwrecked liberal democracy with a 21st-century Christian democracy," Netanyahu’s National-Conservatist government was determined to force constitutional changes to form a Jewish regime which would finally provide Netanyahu a full-control with almost no effective checks and balances on his absolute power. Yet this coup d’état was overturned. Ginzburg and Huk conclude that "a democracy under threat depends critically on support from unelected and non-majoritarian actors" such as party elites, bureaucrats or judges. With the new ruling of the Supreme Court, abolishing the constitutional changes legislated by Netanyahu’s government, it could have been argued that in the Israeli case also it was the judges which defended democracy against a regime change. However, this paper argues it was the other way around: an erupting civil resistance movement which swiftly understood the "Hungarian Protocol" that Netanyahu’s government has adopted, determined to change the constitutional framework and forward an autocracy. The resistance movement thus organized a populous, effective and evolving protest which in effect blocked the coup d’état and gave the courage to the judges to overturn the coalition’s constitutional changes. The paper explores the special relations between Orbán and Netanyahu, the model which the latter has adopted as a blueprint for regime change and the civil resistance which evolved, learning from its Polish and Hungarian counterparts, and succeeded – so far – in preventing the coup d’état. This thickens our understanding of how to bring about a Near Miss democracy.