Protecting and fostering democracy has been a cornerstone of the European Union project since its founding. Yet the recent rise of antidemocratic regimes in countries like Poland and Hungary has invited many questions about the EU’s effectiveness in preventing antidemocratic behavior in its member states. Does the EU’s mechanisms for sanctioning democratic backsliding actually obstruct autocratic behavior? Could the EU be inadvertently abetting the very autocratic actors it intends to thwart? The answer will concern you: The European Union is facilitating democratic erosion in its member countries by fueling the rise of antidemocratic leaders that attack the supranational body to legitimate and sustain their power — and its efforts to sanction this behavior only add fuel to the fire.

The European Union provides a convenient scapegoat that aspiring autocrats can exploit to construct populist Eurosceptic movements. Euroscepticism, a broad term that describes opposition to or criticism of the European integration project, has been on the rise in Europe since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty that created the modern-day EU in 1992. Eurosceptic politicians have attacked the supranational body for enabling the increased economic and territorial integration that facilitated the Eurozone debt crisis in 2009 and fueled the European immigration crisis in the mid-2010s, two unpopular consequences of an increasingly globalized continent. In many European countries, Euroscepticism has developed as a “new and distinct social cleavage that has not easily been internalized or prioritized by traditional political parties” — thus leaving an ideological gap for alternative political movements to fill with a strongly anti-EU message that resonates with European voters harmed by globalization.

Though Euroscepticism has had tangible consequences for the EU — perhaps most notably, the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the union — it is not an intrinsically antidemocratic ideology. However, many antidemocratic parties in Europe have leveraged staunch Euroscepticism to fuel and sustain populist movements in their home countries. As Jan-Werner Müller argues in What is Populism?, populist leaders construct an image of their country in an existential struggle between “the people,” whom they purport to represent, and a corrupt elite class seeking to destroy the country. The European Union is the perfect stand-in for these elite opposition forces: leaders such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland have scored electoral victories by vilifying EU bureaucrats in Brussels as out-of-touch elites who are conspiring to undermine their country’s social fabric and are to blame for all economic troubles. These leaders can construct a compelling “us” vs. “them” narrative because, in most cases, the EU’s decision makers are not fellow countrymen — it is therefore easy to claim they do not represent the true interests of “the people.” Once in power, these leaders begin to erode democratic institutions — from a controversial Hungarian constitution to an overhaul of the Polish courts — and continue to disparage the EU in order to sustain their movements.

The European Union is not solely a rhetorical political device that autocrats can exploit for electoral gain. The European Parliament, the EU’s legislative body, offers an additional political arena for antidemocratic parties to gain legitimacy in Europe and consolidate their domestic appeal. Growing support for antidemocratic right-wing parties in several European countries has translated to increased political power at the supranational level — EP elections this summer led to gains by many of these parties and their far-right coalitions, largely at the expense of progressive and left-wing coalitions. Autocratic politicians like Orbán in Hungary used the compelling language of Euroscepticism to mobilize voters to the polls, portraying the election as a choice between “Brussels and Hungarian freedom.”

As these parties win increasing power in the EP, their leaders gain increased political capital in the European system. Giorgia Meloni, the Italian leader who came to power on an anti-EU platform and has since restricted press freedoms and pursued an anti-pluralist constitutional change, is now a political kingmaker in Europe. As the leader of the European Conservatives and Reformists, the largest right-wing bloc in the EP, she controls top positions in more than a dozen EP committees and has the ear of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, a centrist who has appeared willing to work with far-right coalitions like Meloni’s despite a longstanding EU practice of refusing cooperation with the far-right. Exercising power in the EU allows aspiring autocrats like Meloni to bolster their support at home by demonstrating that they are taking on the EU bureaucracy they furiously denounced in their campaigns. At the same time, welcoming antidemocratic parties into parliamentary coalitions and seeking their input on legislative matters legitimizes the rule of antidemocratic leaders by giving them political power in a democratic supranational government that claims to stand for freedom, democracy, and rule of law in its member countries.

Some might argue that, rather than facilitating democratic erosion, the European Union safeguards democracy in its member states by providing effective mechanisms to punish antidemocratic measures. Article 7 of the EU’s constitutive treaty empowers its decision making bodies to penalize a member state that “seriously and persistently breaches the principles on which the EU is founded” by stripping certain membership rights. In recent years, the EU has used these procedures against Poland and Hungary after each country engaged in antidemocratic behavior. For some observers, these sanctions demonstrate the important role that the EU plays in deterring antidemocratic behavior and punishing it when it occurs.

However, I would argue that the European Union’s mechanisms for preventing democratic erosion have been largely ineffective, and have instead encouraged a backlash that only contributes to the Euroscepticism feeding antidemocratic movements. Opening Article 7 procedures against Poland and Hungary failed to deter either country from pursuing their antidemocratic agenda — the Polish government enacted a controversial judicial reform only hours after Article 7 was invoked, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has continued his antidemocratic crusade in open defiance of EU sanctions. The European Parliament’s system on transnational political coalitions has also shielded antidemocratic parties from accountability. In Bulgaria, the former governing party’s membership in the dominant European People’s Party allowed President Boyko Borisov to erode Bulgaria’s democratic institutions and ignore EU guidance with limited consequences, as the EPP “adamantly supported a government led by its Bulgarian affiliate over expressing concerns about the quality of Bulgarian democracy.” Evidently, the EU’s democracy safeguards have had little success in deterring antidemocratic actors.

Instead, the EU’s punishment of democratic erosion has further fueled antidemocratic movements. Autocratic politicians have combined Euroscepticism with the populist strategy of discrediting the opposition, portraying them as acting “for Brussels” instead of “for the people.” Orbán, for example, recently told supporters that the EU was trying to overthrow his government and install the opposition as a pro-EU “puppet” administration, while former Polish president Jarosław Kaczyński claimed that the country’s pro-EU opposition was working under “foreign orders” to “enslave Poland.” The EU’s failure to sanction democratic backsliding in its member states has also led firm EU supporters to become disillusioned with the bloc. Preliminary research in Poland finds that liberal democrats and citizens “dissatisfied with the functioning of democracy in Poland” have become less supportive of the EU because of the body’s “sluggish reaction to the dismantling of the rule of law and democratic principles.” A similar trend was observed in Bulgaria: according to national media, even pro-EU citizens have become “vocal critics” of the EU’s passive response to democratic erosion in their country. The EU’s effort to sanction autocrats appears to be eroding its legitimacy among pro-EU Europeans — and as they become further disillusioned with the EU’s capacities, they are more susceptible to the very Euroscepticism that has fueled many antidemocratic movements on the continent.

This antidemocratic “feedback loop” is also sustained by the EU’s significant levels of economic and territorial integration. R. Daniel Kelemen, a scholar at Georgetown University,  has contended that the EU is trapped in an “authoritarian equilibrium” whereby the EU struggles to effectively sanction antidemocratic regimes while EU funds and emigration of the opposition through freedom-of-movement arrangements help keep these regimes in power. This theory only bolsters the argument that the EU system fails to obstruct autocratic actors while inadvertently aiding their behavior through its unique supranational structure.

Evidently, the European Union has created ideal conditions for the rise of antidemocratic movements in its member states. Autocratic leaders have effectively harnessed Eurosceptic sentiment to fuel and sustain their populist movements, while simultaneously exploiting the EU’s supranational politics to legitimate their power and shore up domestic support. The EU’s efforts to sanction this antidemocratic behavior, though sincere, have proven ineffective and in many cases counterproductive. Without a serious mobilization to prevent antidemocratic actors from gaining power in national governments and in the European Parliament, it is likely that the EU will remain in “authoritarian equilibrium” for the foreseeable future.

Works Cited

Benson, Robert and Johan Hassel. “EU Elections: What the Results Mean and Why They Matter.” Center for American Progress. June 13, 2024. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/eu-elections-what-the-results-mean-and-why-they-matter/.

De Búrca, Gráinne. “Is EU Supranational Governance a Challenge to Liberal Constitutionalism?” University of Chicago Law Review. https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archive/eu-supranational-governance-challenge-liberal-constitutionalism.

Gherghina, Sergiu and Petar Bankov. 2023. “Troublemakers and Game Changers: How Political Parties Stopped Democratic Backsliding in Bulgaria.” Democratization 30(8): 1582-1603. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13510347.2023.2250985

Kelemen, R. Daniel. 2020. “The European Union’s Authoritarian Equilibrium.” Journal of European Public Policy 27 (3): 481–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2020.1712455.

Müller, Jan-Werner. 2016. What Is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.