(C) Freedom House
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From Democratic Decline to Authoritarian Aggression [1]
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Date: 2022-11
Russia was not the only country to sink further into the depths of autocracy. In Belarus, President Alyaksandr Lukashenka similarly tightened the screws on the remaining vestiges of free expression and political opposition. After crushing mass protests against the rigged 2020 presidential election with crucial Russian support, Lukashenka’s regime set about purging the civic and media sectors, forcing real and perceived critics to choose between incarceration or exile abroad—though the May 2021 hijacking of an international flight to arrest Raman Pratasevich demonstrated that even exiles court danger if they continue their activism. Now, in 2022, Lukashenka is repaying his enormous political debt to Putin by enabling and supporting the invasion of Ukraine.
Developments in Kyrgyzstan illustrate how quickly authoritarian regimes can become consolidated, particularly when democratic checks on power have already been weakened. Following his extralegal rise to the presidency in 2020, Sadyr Japarov transformed Kyrgyzstan’s government into his personal fief, manipulating voters and rigging a referendum process to overhaul the constitution and reinstitute a presidential model that grants him vast influence over the state. Having thus neutralized the independence and power of the judicial and legislative branches, Japarov moved to weaken the country’s nonstate institutions, overseeing harsher attacks on civil society and the independent media in 2021. He is now poised to stay in office for many years to come.
While Japarov’s ascendancy in Kyrgyzstan has coincided with an uptick in border clashes with Tajikistan, it is the invasion of Ukraine—led by Moscow and enabled by Minsk—that offers the most potent reminder of the link between national governance and international order. Both domestic repression and military aggression are the foreseeable products of a form of government in which one leader wields unchecked authority and imposes their will through force. The extinction of Russian democracy and the war against Ukrainian democracy are, in effect, two sides of the same autocratic coin.
Stuck in the gray zone
This year, for the first time in the 21st century, the prevailing form of governance in the Nations in Transit region is the hybrid regime. Four democracies have fallen into this gray zone since the unbroken period of democratic decline began in 2004: Hungary, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia. During the same period, three authoritarian regimes made democratic strides and joined the ranks of hybrid regimes: Moldova, Kosovo, and now Armenia.
While these regimes combine elements of democracy and authoritarian rule, they are analytically distinct from both. They may be democratic in the minimal sense that they feature regular, competitive elections, but their dysfunctional institutions are unable to deliver the definitive components of a liberal democracy: checks and balances, the rule of law, and robust protections for the rights and liberties of all.
The ranks of hybrid regimes have been swollen by elected leaders in erstwhile democracies who abandoned any commitment to liberal democratic principles in their pursuit of a de facto monopoly on power. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary exemplifies this trend, and he has worked actively to propagate likeminded governments across Central and Eastern Europe. Still playing the good democrat, he allowed competitive elections on April 3 of this year, but he and his Fidesz party pressed the entire state apparatus—along with the politically captured bulk of the civic and media sectors—into service against the opposition. The vote was consequently not free, let alone fair. Now that Orbán has survived it, he is likely to give full vent to his illiberal and kleptocratic tendencies. Much the same could be said of President Aleksandar Vučić of Serbia, who, along with his Serbian Progressive Party, swept that country’s April 3 elections.
Both men are following the ignoble path blazed in the 2000s by the governments of President Milo Đukanović of Montenegro and former prime minister Nikola Gruevski of North Macedonia, which dispensed with liberal norms by bribing voters, wiretapping opponents, and resisting any mechanisms of transparency or accountability that might have interfered with the corrupt and opaque exercise of power.
The countries that have moved from authoritarian to hybrid forms of governance present a somewhat more promising picture, though they still fall short of democratic standards. In Armenia, for example, citizens used a protest movement in 2018 and a series of competitive elections, most recently in 2021, to decisively end the Republican Party’s multidecade reign. The incumbents were replaced with a new generation of politicians who, despite notable flaws, possess a basic commitment to democracy and the public interest.
Democratic forces in Moldova and Kosovo have also mobilized in the public square and at the ballot box to dislodge corrupt or authoritarian parties from positions of power. In the early 2000s, similar efforts in Georgia and Ukraine prevented those countries from slipping out of the hybrid regime category and into full-fledged authoritarianism. Despite democratic progress since then, however, liberal norms and institutions have yet to take hold.
The former democracies that have tumbled into the gray zone continue to earn better scores in this report than former authoritarian regimes that have risen into the hybrid band. Even within these two subgroups, there is a great deal of difference between countries. Something all hybrid regimes have in common, though, is that they seem to be stuck in their category. Since the start of the region’s democratic decline in 2004, no country with a hybrid regime designation has managed to shake it off—for better or worse.
The failure of any hybrid regime to fully democratize should be a sobering fact for liberal democracy’s supporters. Formally, Nations in Transit designates countries in this category as “hybrid/transitional,” suggesting that hybridity is a waystation on the road to democracy, in keeping with the post–Cold War assumptions that shaped this report's methodology. But in practice the gray zone is a destination in its own right.
Zahony, Hungary – March 17, 2022 – A young refugee from Ukraine reaches for snacks offered by a volunteer. Image credit: Christopher Furlong / Staff, Getty Images
At the same time, the fact that no hybrid regime has reverted to authoritarianism is a testament to the abiding power of the liberal international order and the values it represents. In the case of Hungary and the hybrid regimes of the Western Balkans, the European Union (EU) remains an imperfect but important bulwark against precipitous democratic backsliding.
The EU may even be able to reverse some damage: its hard-won conditionality mechanism for the rule of law, which ties the bloc’s budgetary disbursements to member states’ respect for foundational EU values, could play a crucial role in shoring up Hungary’s democracy, though the European Commission must test this hypothesis by fully implementing it. In the formerly authoritarian states of the EU’s Eastern Partnership, the promise of liberal democracy—of genuine popular sovereignty, good governance, respect for human rights, and economic growth—remains attractive enough that citizens are willing to fight for it. In Ukraine, they are even willing to risk their lives for it.
Trouble at the top
Even the comparatively strong democracies of Central and Eastern Europe have not been immune to the broader region’s democratic decline. Eight of the 10 countries this report still classifies as democracies earned lower scores for the events of 2021, and the scores of the remaining two did not improve. For the first time this century, no country in the region is rated within Nations in Transit’s highest score band (that is, none received a Democracy Score of 6.01–7.00), which is reserved for countries that embody the best practices of liberal democracy.
Increasingly in these countries, corrupt practices are supplanting best practices. In Estonia, the last country to leave the highest score band, a ruling coalition led by the Centre Party collapsed early in 2021 after it became ensnared in a COVID-19-related public procurement scandal. However, Centre soon found itself back in power in partnership with the Reform Party, whose decision to overlook its ally’s record of graft contributed to the normalization of political corruption.
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[1] Url:
https://freedomhouse.org/report/nations-transit/2022/from-democratic-decline-to-authoritarian-aggression
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