De-Europeanization and De-Democratization Trends in Ece: From the Potemkin Democracy to the Elected Autocracy in Hungary

The decline of the "deficit democracies" in East-Central Europe has accelerated during the global crisis. Nowadays it is rather difficult to find the proper term for these hybrid polities between democracy and non-democracy. The main tendency is the growing gap between the formal democracy and substantial democracy that has been hollowing out the democracy and deepened into DeEuropeanization and De-Democratization. This tendency has been the most evident and visible in Hungary as a worst-case scenario, since after the 2010 elections a genuine Potemkin democracy has emerged in Hungary with a democratic facade but with a quasi "one-party rule" behind that has turned by the 2014 elections into an elected autocracy. In the other ECE countries this decline has been much less marked, but the fusion of economy and politics has still taken place with the increasing public-political role of oligarchies, reaching even the government level. The decline of democracy - with this emptied Potemkin democracy and its oligarchical elite party politics - has generated deep dissatisfaction of the ECE populations and it has led to the collapse of the first party systems in the series of the "critical elections.Key words: de-democratization, de-Europeanization, informal institutions, state/agency capture, democracy capture, chaotic democracy, elected autocracy.1 INTRODUCTION: THE AGE OF UNCERTAINTY IN THE ECE COUNTRIES "IN-BETWEEN"The decline of democracy has been a common tendency in the ECE polities in general and in the ECE party systems in particular. Nowadays the ECE countries are "in-between", i.e. somewhere between democracy and non-democracy. Although this historical trajectory has been largely described in the international scholarship, it has still remained a very much-contested issue among the ECE academics due to the high national sensitivities and the apologetic efforts of the incumbent governments. The international political science has discussed the ECE region in terms of declining democracy at least since the 2007 Special Issue of Journal of Democracy (Rupnik 2007). On the occasion of the Ten Years of the EU Membership the ECE democracy decline has recently been reviewed by the 2013 Special Issue of East European Politics and Society (Rupnik and Zielonka 2013) and by the 2014 Special Issue of Journal of Common Market Studies (Epstein and Jacoby 2014). 2This decline has been confirmed and well-documented by the big ranking institutions, like the Bertelsmann Foundation, The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and the Freedom House (FH, with Nations in Transit, NIT Reports) and the likes. At the first glance, indeed, there has been a growing gap between the formal democracy and substantial democracy from the very beginning of systemic change as widely documented by the Freedom House and the EIU year by year. This gap has led to the increasing between tension between the level of socio-economic development and the policy performance of these countries, indicated by the contrast between the situation index (SI) and management index (MI) of the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI). These comprehensive assessments have also been supported by the data on the growing corruption in ECE by the Transparency International and many other international institutions on the low trust in political elites. Finally, this basic contradiction has generated the decreasing competitiveness, described in the annual reports of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Institute of Management Development (IMD), so this "matrix" of historical trajectory has been completed by their worsening global rankings. Thus, despite the national sensitivities in the ECE countries and the apologetic views of the loyal experts around the national governments, the "medical check-up" of these countries has indicated serious socio-economic and political crisis as a converging assessment of all relevant international policy institutes.3Moreover, the international media has also reported from the ECE countries about the electoral landslides and the high corruption scandals, and about the demonstrative actions of the oligarchs in and around the governments. …