From Hybrid Regime to Consolidation of Authoritarianism? The Case of Georgia (2020-2025)

The paper explores a puzzling reversal in the political trajectory of Georgia emblematic case of democratic breakthrough and EU-oriented reform that have evolved into entrenched hybrid regimes marked by increasingly authoritarian tendencies. Existing research on ‘autocratisation’ highlights several explanatory factors, such as cultural backlash against Western liberal-democratic norms, economic insecurity following successive crises (financial, pandemic, energy), the autocracy promotion by regional actors (mainly Russia), and a permissive geopolitical context in which competition between major powers enables domestic incumbents to consolidate control while maintaining nominal EU approximation. Against this backdrop, the paper advances the debate by highlighting how Georgia’s illiberal discourses and populist power strategies reshape domestic and foreign policy agendas. Departing from institutional or external-interference explanations of democratic backsliding, the study focuses on discursive mechanisms of authoritarian entrenchment, tracing how authoritarian actors across Europe’s periphery learn from and adapt to one another, thereby reinforcing autocratic consolidation, particularly emphasizing borrowings of Georgia from Orban’s Hungary. Methodologically, the paper combines a discourse-historical approach and qualitative process tracing to capture both language and process, uncovering how populist actors reinterpret key signifiers such as sovereignty, identity, and Europeanness, gradually redefining the moral boundaries of democracy and revealing how the ‘jungle grows back’ through normalisation of hate speech, symbolic exclusion, and moralised nationalism. By mapping these discursive shifts, the paper contributes to understanding of how authoritarian populism reclaims legitimacy not in open defiance of EUrope, but by appropriating its vocabulary, revealing how the erosion of democracy is both transnationally learned and locally spoken. The study uncovers the production, circulation and operation of narratives and frames, based on a theory of the moral panic developed by Stanley Cohen (1972) and moral panic button (MPB) of Sik and Kreko applied to Hungary (2025) for creating simultaneous crisis- and fear-mongering campaigns against enemies (decadent West at the core).