Forging, Bending, and Breaking: Enacting the “Illiberal Playbook” in Hungary and Poland

Abstract

In recent years, Central and Eastern Europe have furnished several examples of illiberalism in power. The most prominent and consequential cases are Fidesz, which has ruled in Hungary since 2010, and Law and Justice (PiS), which has ruled in Poland since 2015. In both cases, illiberal governments have embarked upon an extensive project of political reform aimed at dismantling the liberal-democratic order. We examine the nature, scope, and consequences of these processes of autocratisation. We first argue that illiberal changes are ideologically founded and identify how both populism and nativism figure in the policymaking of illiberals in power. We then show how these practices emerge from a common “illiberal playbook”—a paradigm of policy change comprising forms of forging, bending, and breaking—and elaborate on the notion that illiberal governments are using legalism to kill liberalism. The fine-grained approach that we employ allows us to distinguish between different rationales and gradations of illiberal policymaking, and assess their implications for the rule of law, executive power, and civil rights and freedoms

Analyzing national policy styles empirically using the Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI): insights into long‐term patterns of policy‐making

“…In all likelihood, Hungary has a low score in public consultation in policy‐making because the observation period starts after Viktor Orbán's electoral victory in 2010. The Orbán Administration has taken a series of steps to transform the country into an illiberal democracy (Bauer & Becker, 2020; Pirro & Stanley, 2021), which is reflected in the SGI scores.…”

“…Similar to the previous two cases, the changes in Malta and Poland can be attributed to deliberate decisions taken by the countries' political leadership (Tosun et al, 2022). In Poland, both scores went down over time, which must be seen against the background of a political transformation process that started with the entering into office of the Law and Justice party in 2015, which has aimed at dismantling the liberal‐democratic order (Pirro & Stanley, 2021). Since both the president and the prime ministers have been affiliated with the Law and Justice party, the set of institutional reforms were implemented swiftly.…”

Populists and the Pandemic

“…In its rejection of Poland's political, economic and cultural elites of post-1989 Poland and the broad premises of the liberal-democratic orthodoxy that had inspired them and in its implacable espousal of an intolerant monism, PiS was quintessentially populist. On taking power in 2015, it swiftly neutralized institutions of control, turning public media into an outlet of executive propaganda and transforming the Constitutional Tribunal into a politically compliant body tasked with granting retrospective legitimacy to acts of doubtful legality or straightforward illegality ( Sadurski 2019;Pirro and Stanley 2022). These actions prompted conflict with international institutions, in particular the European Commission, which declared Poland in breach of its commitments to uphold the rule of law and commenced proceedings under Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union.…”

Understanding Right-Wing Populism and What to Do about It

“…One important distinction is between the more ethnically pluralistic societies such as Latvia and Estonia, where RWPPs mobilise against larger politicised ethnic groups, and the more ethnically homogenous countries such as Poland, Hungary and Slovenia, where mobilisation takes place along socially conservative lines (Bustikova 2018). These cases are characterised by radicalised mainstream RWPPs in government, resulting in democratic backsliding in power (Pirro and Stanley 2021). Given the low levels of immigration in the region, Eastern European RWPPs tend to target domestic minorities.…”

“…While Fidesz and PiS both won power as mainstream conservative parties, they have radicalised in government and implemented a series of measures to undermine democratic institutions (Vachudova 2020). As such, they have become associated with a decline in the overall quality of democracy in Hungary and Poland, respectively (Pirro and Stanley 2021).…”