Hijacking Democracy: Proposals on the Future of the European Union in Czechia, Hungary, and Slovakia (2015–2022)
Journal: Politics and Governance
Year: 2025

EU integration has opened new controversies in making sense of democracy. This article studies how discourses on democracy in EU integration open spaces to hijack the concept of democracy, using a novel empirical dataset on proposals for reforming EU democracy formulated during the rise of the “EU crisis” rhetoric between 2015–2022. The analysis focuses on 131 proposals from Czechia, Hungary, and Slovakia as sources with the rationale to present forward‐looking claims on EU democracy. The three