The Democracy Challenge in Central Europe: backsliding or repoliticisation?
Central European countries have been recently associated with the crisis of democracy. Building on the concept of democratic backsliding, our researchers Jakub Eberle a Daniel Šitera examined the current state of democracy in their book chapter.
Jakub Eberle and Daniel Šitera contributed to the new book titled "Crises and Challenges for the European Union" with their research on the democratic crisis in Central Europe.
The research goes beyond the narrow reading provided by the ‘democratic backsliding’ thesis and instead opens up to the broader politics of democracy, which we understand as a social struggle over the meanings and relationships between ‘democracy’, ‘Europe’ and ‘market’. We argue that the current crisis in Central Europe is above all an open-ended process of repoliticisation, with the participation of a whole range of different actors - political parties, civil society, and social movements. Our perspective aims at giving voice to the plurality of actors and alternatives that have been all too often neglected.