Look, democracy falls! The case of the democratic backsliding in Slovakia

A shift towards populism is nowadays perceived as democratic backsliding. The term originates in the biblical apostasy. The very same concept originally represented an act of falling away from the faith. However, it was not pure faith that was affected. This fall meant a decline of trust in the righteousness of the authority. That the authority is powerful as it claims to be. This process starts with doubting the authority's power and ends with doubting the existence of the authority itself. The same phenomenon is hidden in the term today. It is about falling away from the faith in a liberal constitutional democracy, its elites, and the rules that maintain it. This paper will look at the democratic backsliding in Slovakia. There is no doubt that Slovak politics has been on the slippery slope of backsliding since its very beginnings in 1993. It would be unfair to blame particular administrations for everything. However, since the COVID-19 pandemic, the slope has become much steeper. The weakening of the rule of law has started a gradual shift towards populism and authoritarianism. This paper will focus on the paradigmatic change in both interior and foreign policies in Slovakia. At the center of this paper will be civil society organizations in Slovakia. The recent backsliding was expected before the parliamentary election in 2023. Based on the qualitative research among civil society organizations, the paper will present the concerns and expectations of the CSOs about the election results. Unfortunately for the third sector, the concerns have come true, and the newly elected government started immediately to attack the organizations working as public watchdogs, organizations with international funding, and organizations working on diversity. The paper will map and analyze, step by step, how the new administration works on dismantling the civil society in Slovakia. Moreover, the development in Slovakia will be put in comparative perspective with the steps of the PiS administration in Poland between 2015-2023 and Orbán’s administration in Hungary since 2010. The expectation and the following thesis is that Slovakia will witness one of the fastest democratic backslidings that we have seen in the region. Fico’s administration has already presented steps against civil society organizations, the judicial system, and independent institutions such as the Antimonopoly office. Furthermore, it has been enacting penal reform, which raises concerns from experts, expecting a rapid growth of organized crime.