Democratic Backsliding in Poland and Hungary Michael Bernhard Since the onset of the global financial crisis and the great recession in 2007-9, we have entered an age of democratic backsliding.1 The countries affected not only include weak democracies considered to be at risk, but also countries like Poland and Hungary, once considered regional leaders in the process of democratization in postcommunist Europe. The purpose of this contribution is to understand how two countries considered the biggest democratic successes in postcommunist Europe became its most notorious cases of democratic backsliding. Unlike past waves of democratic failure, the episode has not been marked by spectacular disjunctive events like putsches, coups, civil wars, and seizures of power.2 Instead, there has been a decline in the quality of democracy, often led by leaders who have won democratic elections. A set of facilitating structural conditions—recession, increased inequality, peak immigration, austerity, and rapid social change—combined with a politics of exclusion and fear practiced by populist politicians has led to challenges to democracy in both established (the United States, Great Britain, India) and newer democracies (Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Philippines, Nicaragua, and Turkey). These populist leaders give voice to disenchanted citizens who feel cheated by corrupt elites who have stacked the system in their favor.3 Once they have secured executive power bolstered by parliamentary majorities, they then move to curtail horizontal checks and balances, gutting judicial oversight and other autonomous regulatory agencies. Many also try to undermine social accountability by passing legislation or engaging in informal practices that undermine the ability of civil society and the independent media to impose costs on office holders. Such practices are now widespread in Poland and Hungary. Backsliding does not always lead to regime change. In the two cases explored here Hungary is increasingly seen as a failed democracy. Such electoral authoritarian regimes continue to hold elections but tip the balance in The author wishes to thank Jason Wittenberg and Venelin Ganev for comments on drafts of the manuscript, and the University of Florida Foundation for its research support. 1. Nancy Bermeo, "On Democratic Backsliding," Journal of Democracy 27, no. 1 (January 2016): 5-19; Anna Liihrmann and Staffan I. Lindberg, "A Third Wave of Autocratization is Here: What is New About It?" Democratization 26, no. 7 (2019): 1095-1113; and David Waldner and Ellen Lust, "Unwelcome Change: Coming to Terms with Democratic Backsliding," Annual Review of Political Science 21 (2018): 93-113. 2. Juan Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (Baltimore, 1978). 3. Cas Mudde, "The Populist Zeitgeist," Government and Opposition 39, no. 4 (December 2004): 541-63. Slavic Review 80, no. 3 (Fall 2021) © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (https://creativecommons.Org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work, doi: 10.1017/slr.2021.145 https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2021.145 Published online by Cambridge University Press 586 Slavic Review favor of the incumbent by resorting to what Andreas Schedler has called the "menu of manipulation," and what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have called "an uneven playing field" of electoral competition.4 Unlike the classic accounts of the rise of electoral authoritarianism which are often the product of failed transition, Hungary's path came via backsliding. Backsliding does not always entail a full-blown descent into electoral authoritarianism; in some cases it registers only as a reduction in the quality of democracy by weakening democratic norms and institutions. Most consider Poland to be in this situation. Eastern Europe has not been immune from such trends. There are earlier cases of fledgling democracy that reverted to authoritarianism, albeit in postcommunist forms (Russia, Belarus) or other cases which have alternated between democracy and electoral authoritarianism (Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, Moldova). The current pattern of backsliding in the region was unexpected because it afflicted two states, Hungary and Poland, which initiated the regional process of democratization in 1989, were long seen as regional leaders in the building of liberal democracy, quickly joined the European Union (EU), and were even considered consolidated democracies.5 Another reason why backsliding in Poland and Hungary is particularly unsettling is that the responsible parties, the Fidesz—Hungarian Civil Alliance in Hungary and Law and Justice (PiS) in Poland are established parties whose origins lie with the democratic opposition under communism.6 Both had track records as democratic parties that contested power, participated in government, and stepped down when they lost elections. In other cases of democratic backsliding in the region the leading actors have commonly been drawn either from the former communist power-elite or come from novel post-communist parties (Borisov in Bulgaria, Babis in Czechia, or Vucic in Serbia).7 4. I am using the term electoral authoritarianism coined by Andreas Schedler here, though I could have just as easily used the term competitive authoritarianism coined by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way—Schedler, "Elections Without Democracy: The Menu of Manipulation," Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (April 2002): 36-50 and Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War (Cambridge, Eng., 2010), 6. 5. According to Freedom House's Nations in Transit Scores both Poland Hungary were consolidated democracies by the late 1990s. Hungary lost that ranking in 2014 and Poland remains one. See "About Nations in Transit," at freedomhouse.org/report-types/nations-transit (accessed August 6, 2021). Representative studies of this academic consensus include Attila Agh, "The Early Consolidation in East Central Europe: Parliamentarization as a Region-specific Way of Democratization," Tdrsadalom es gazdasdg Kdzep- es Kelet-Europdbane/Society and Economy in Central and Eastern Europe 21, no. 3, "Ten Years After: Democratic Transition and Consolidation in East and Central Europe" (1999): 83-110; and Grzegorz Ekiert and Daniel Ziblatt, "Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe One Hundred Years On," East European Politics and Societies 27, no. 1 (February 2013): 90-107. On the role of this early progress in effecting decisions on EU membership, see Milada Vachudova, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration After Communism (Oxford, 2005). 6. The name Fidesz comes from the original name of the party—the Alliance of Young Democrats (Fiatal Demokratak Szovetsege) prior to its transformation from a liberal-democratic formation to a national conservative one. 7. The only other country where this has been the case is Slovenia under the current Jansa government, a case that shares a pattern of transition not unlike Poland and Hungary. Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik, "The Politics and Cultures of Memory Regimes: A Comparative Analysis," in Bernhard and Kubik, eds., Twenty Years After Communism: The Politics of Memory and Commemoration (Oxford, 2014), 281-96. https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2021.145 Published online by Cambridge University Press Democratic Backsliding in Poland and Hungary 587 V-Dem Electoral Democracy Index (1989-2019) i o.i 0 1939 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2017 2019 Figure 1: Democratic Backsliding in East Central Europe The deterioration in democracy in Poland and Hungary is plain to see in Figure 1, which plots the electoral democracy index from the Varieties of Democracy project for those two countries plus Czechia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. Along with Czechia, Poland and Hungary rapidly democratized while the other three were slower. While Slovakia also attained a high level of democracy, albeit later, both Romania and Bulgaria achieved more moderate levels. While the figure makes clear a general deterioration of democracy in the region, in Hungary and Poland it is much more precipitous, with both falling to levels in the neighborhood of Romania and Bulgaria, with Hungary now in the basement. To reiterate, the central question that this article seeks to answer is how and why democratic backsliding occurred in Poland and Hungary, countries whose previous rapid and deep democratic progress should have made them "least-likely cases" for backsliding. To understand why this occurred I return to the literature on democratic transition and its hypothesized impact on long-term democratic stability. Two different literatures, one that emphasizes the 8. Michael Coppedgle, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Michael Bernhard, M. Steven Fish, Adam Glynn, Allen Hicken, Anna Luhrmann, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Steven Wilson, Agnes Cornell, Nazifa Alizada, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerlow, Garry Hindle, Nina Ilchenko, Laura Maxwell, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Johannes von Römer, Aksel Sundström, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Tore Wig, and Daniel Ziblatt, 2020. "V-Dem: [Country-Year/Country-Date] Dataset vlO." Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. https://doi.org/10.23696/vdemds20. https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2021.145 Published online by Cambridge University Press 588 Slavic Review role of elite bargaining and the other which emphasizes the role of contentious transitions both suggest that Poland and Hungary had good prospects for democratic consolidation. In the remainder of this article I will (1) review these literatures on contentious and accommodative transitions; (2) discuss the cases of Poland and Hungary and show that they are not readily reduced to cases of negotiated or contentious transition; and (3) argue that the combination of negotiation and contention, in concert with changing structural conditions in which both countries were embedded, contributed to democratic backsliding. In doing so I hope to show how the reevaluation of past theories and the reinterpretation of events in that light help us make ex post facto sense of unexpected reversals as we have observed in Poland and Hungary. Paths of Extrication and Democracy Democratization in the late twentieth century included a large number of nonviolent transitions that involved negotiations between authoritarian incumbents and oppositional elites. There was a consensus in the foundational literature on democratic transition, based on the experiences of Spain and Latin America, that successful democratic transitions were predicated on implicit or explicit understandings between the soft-line faction of the authoritarian incumbents, and the moderate wing of their oppositional challengers.9 Further, there was the expectation that with the "crafting" of the right set of institutions through elite consensus, stable democratic outcomes were probable.10 The literature on modes of transition moved the discussion on the effects of transition on long-term democratic stability beyond the content of the settlements to also encompass the means by which they were transacted.11 Particular attention was paid to "the identity of the actors who drive the transition and the strategies they employ."12 The questions of whether authoritarian incumbents or their challengers were ascendant in the transition process and whether it involved a greater degree of accommodation or confrontation were seen as critical. Over time, this debate focused on whether transitions were pacted, negotiated, and controlled at the elite level, or contentious, where popular mobilization played a role in constraining elite power. I will argue that the Polish and Hungarian transitions do not easily fall into either 9. Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore, 1986); and Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge, Eng., 1991). 10. O'Donnell and Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule; Przeworski, Democracy and the Market; and Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore, 1996). 11. Terry Lynn Karl, "Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America," Comparative Politics 23, no. 1 (October 1990): 9; Terry Lynn Karl and Philippe C. Schmitter, "Modes of Transition in Latin America, Southern and Eastern Europe," International Social Science Journal 43, no. 128 (June 1991): 276-77. 12. GerardoL.MunckandCarolSkalnikLeff,"ModesofTransitionandDemocratization: South America and Eastern Europe in Comparative Perspective," Comparative Politics 29, no. 3 (April 1997): 343. https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2021.145 Published online by Cambridge University Press Democratic Backsliding in Poland and Hungary 589 type, which helped to structure similar patterns of post-transition politics that help us understand their unexpected paths to democratic backsliding. I conceptualize the extrication from communism as a critical juncture for regime formation that created twenty years of democratic stability in both Poland and Hungary. This stability was disrupted, quite unexpectedly, by the incorporation of both countries into the EU, and by two external shocks, the great recession of 2007-9 and the European refugee crisis of 2015. In this discussion I will focus explicitly on the impact of the mixture of contention and accommodation in their democratic transitions, building on, but fundamentally revising the insights of the modes of transition literature. With benefit of hindsight, I will show that this dichotomy was an oversimplification that with rethinking helps to explain the vulnerability of democracy in both countries. In thinking about the legacies of extrication from authoritarian regimes, partisans of theories of contentious versus accommodative processes disagreed strongly over which pattern contributed to democratic success. Early on, many believed that accommodation facilitated durable democracy. Michael Burton, Michael Gunther, and John Higley argued that negotiated elite settlements led to consolidated democracy by creating consensus on norms and rules, promoting legitimacy, limited government, moderation, and the effective channeling of popular demands.13 In a variant of this argument, Gretchen Casper and Michelle Taylor argued that difficult negotiations that resolved substantive differences between incumbents and the opposition stood a better chance of making real democratic progress. When the opposition pushed hard for real democratic concessions this increased their popular support, causing incumbents to compromise and adapt to the emerging democratic environment. Failure of the opposition to take a strong stand would allow the authoritarian incumbents to structure post-extrication institutions to their advantage and delay or even block the full emergence of democracy.14 In contrast to this, others stress contentious transitions as the key to long-term democratic stability. Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufmann show that in cases where democratic transition includes distributional conflict, the quality of democracy improves in the long term.15 This parallels Robert Fishman's paired comparison of Spain and Portugal, where in the long term Portugal's revolution created a higher degree of democratic responsiveness than Spain's elite bargaining.16 Dawn Brancati demonstrates that the size of democratic protests has a salutary effect on the depth of democratic reform.17 Both Donatella della Porta and I argue that popular participation and contention in episodes of democratization create better odds for success in transition 13. Michael Burton, Michael Gunther, and John Higley, "Introduction: Elite Transformations and Democratic Regimes," in Higley and Gunther, eds., Elites andDemocratic Consolidation in Latin America and Southern Europe (Cambridge, Eng., 1992): 1-37. 14. Gretchen Casper and Michelle M. Taylor, Negotiating Democracy: Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (Pittsburgh, 1996), 164-66. 15. Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman, Dictators and Democrats: Masses, Elites, and Regime Change (Princeton, 2016). 16. Robert Fishman, Democratic Practice: Origins of the Iberian Divide in Political Inclusion (Oxford, 2019). 17. Dawn Brancati, Democracy Protests: Origins, Features and Significance (Cambridge, Eng., 2016). https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2021.145 Published online by Cambridge University Press 590 Slavic Review and better democratic outcomes.18 What all these studies stress is how mobilized citizenries block the ability of elites to channel reforms in ways that allow them to either maintain the status quo or convert their power into new forms of privilege. Different analysts have discussed the Polish and Hungarian transitions as accommodative because both involved roundtable negotiations as critical components of the process, while others argue they were contentious because the oppositions in both countries were based on networks of civil society organizations that had emerged prior to transition under late communism. While the literature hypothesizes different outcomes on the basis of whether extrications from authoritarianism are accommodative or contentious, neither Poland nor Hungary is easily characterized as either. Both cases involved elements of accommodation and contention and phases in both processes could be characterized as one or the other. In the next section, I will explore how the categories in this literature do not neatly map onto Poland or Hungary. Further, I will then argue that this combination of negotiation and contention created conditions in the longer term that proved conducive to democratic backsliding despite early promising starts. Retrospective Evaluation of the Extrications in Poland and Hungary Quite often the Polish extrication of 1989 is treated as a prototypical negotiated transition to democracy.19 This is because of the Roundtable Agreement of April 1989 in which the communist party relinquished its monopoly over organization and information and the terms of electoral competition were established. The Hungarians also had Roundtable talks, but they broke down before completion and the final shape of the rules for extrication were determined by a plebiscite due to the recalcitrance of elements in the opposition to adopt rules that favored the communist incumbents. The Hungarian extrication is thus presented as having both elements of accommodation and extrication while the Polish process is seen as accommodative.20 This consensus is due for reconsideration, however. The Polish extrication is mischaracterized as simply accommodative. First, the initiation of the extrication process from communism and its ability to affect true democratic change was a function of the strength of the Polish opposition. The Solidarity opposition that negotiated with the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) in 1989 traced its roots back to 1976 with the emergence of several precursor 18. Donatella Delia Porta, Mobilizing for Democracy: Comparing 1989 and 2011 (Oxford, 2014); and Michael Bernhard, "The Moore Thesis: What's Left after 1989?," Democratization 23, no. 1 (January 2016): 118-40. 19. Munck and Leff, Modes of Transition and Democratization; Karl and Schmitter, "Modes of Transition in Latin America"; Wiktor Osiatynski, "The Roundtable Talks in Poland," in Jon Elster, ed., The Roundtable Talks and the Breakdown of Communism (Chicago, 1996), 21-68; and Josep M. Colomer, "Transitions by Agreement: Modeling the Spanish Way," American Political Science Review 84, no. 4 (December 1991): 1283-1302. 20. One notable exception to this is Marjorie Castle, Triggering Communism's Collapse: Perceptions and Power in Poland's Transition (Lanham, MD, 2003), who captures the elements of both accommodation and contention. https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2021.145 Published online by Cambridge University Press Democratic Backsliding in Poland and Hungary 591 organizations to the union, its sixteen months of legal existence in 1980-81, and its persistence as an underground opposition from Martial Law until its relegalization.21 The Roundtable in Poland was triggered by a strike wave in 1988 that demonstrated that the regime's efforts to stabilize the country following Martial Law had failed. The regime was prepared to make wide-ranging concessions to draw Solidarity into a reform process. It relegalized the union and invited it to Roundtable Negotiations in March 1989. Under the terms of the agreement signed in April, competitive elections were scheduled for June, but with substantial guarantees for the ruling communists and their allies. The PZPR, the United Peasant Party (ZSL), and Democratic Party (SD) were guaranteed two thirds of the 460 seats in the Sejm, with the remainder fully contested. A second chamber, a Senat, was created and its 100 mandates were fully contested. The accord also created an executive president, elected by the joint membership of the two houses. Given the guarantees, the first occupant of that office was expected to be chosen by the PZPR. It was also expected that the first Prime Minister would come from the communist camp.22 Things did not go according to plan. Ultimately, all contested seats, save one in the Senate, were won by the Citizen's Committees created by Solidarity and many seats reserved for the communists were left unfilled because of insufficient vote totals. The weak performance of the PZPR led the ZSL and the SD to defect from their efforts to form a government. A compromise was then negotiated for a national unity government led by a Solidarity Prime Minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, in return for allowing the PZPR's leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, to assume the presidency. With this failure of the Roundtable to live up to its terms, the Polish extrication path once again moved from negotiated to contentious. Once the terms were breached, Solidarity activists continued to push against the remaining guarantees for the communists that stood in the way of full democracy. A cadre of activists left out of the government, centered on Solidarity's leader, Lech Walesa, continued to push for more radical reforms, whereas the Mazowiecki government continued to stress abiding by the terms of the previous negotiated compact. The pressure from below proved too much to resist and a second set of negotiations led to direct election of the president in 1990, a contest won by Walesa, and the replacement of the Mazowiecki government. This new government, in turn, called fully competitive legislative elections in 1991. The extrication in Hungary was similarly contentious, but less protracted. As the second to move, the Hungarians faced less uncertainty about Soviet intentions. The political opposition in Hungary was not as developed as its 21. Michael Bernhard, The Origins of Democratization in Poland: Workers, Intellectuals, and Oppositional Politics, 1976-1980 (New York, 1993); Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (University Park, PA, 1994); and David Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968, (Philadelphia, 1990). 22. Castle, Triggering Communism's Collapse, chapter 6; and Michael Bernhard, Institutions and The Fate of Democracy: Germany and Poland in the Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh, 2005), chapter 5. https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2021.145 Published online by Cambridge University Press 592 Slavic Review Polish counterpart. It supported an alternative uncensored public space, but was more modest in its outreach to society at large. However, late in the tenure of the communist regime it showed an increasing capacity to demonstrate and stage other public events on national anniversaries and on issues such as ecological destruction, the rights of the Hungarian diaspora, and peace. It was divided between a more liberal/social democratic Budapest-based component and a more provincial Christian democratic wing. These two wings crys-talized into competing proto-parties—the Free Democratic Union (SzDSz) and the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF). Another important actor was the liberal student milieu organized as the Young Democratic Union (Fidesz).23 Reading the writing on the walls, the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSzMP), which had a sustained history of reformism and back-tracking, took a proactive stance after the removal of longtime leader Jánoš Kádár. They made contact with the opposition and tried to draw them into the process of reform from a position of strength. Their leading figure, Imre Pozsgay, had good relations with the MDF, but failed to draw them into a durable cross-camp alliance in a gambit to extend his power. Such overtures were rejected by the SzDSz and other elements in the opposition and the Roundtable Negotiations in Hungary broke down over the question of whether a new executive president, to which Pozsgay aspired, would be directly elected prior to parliament, or would be appointed by a freely elected one. SzDSz then mounted a petition campaign for a referendum to resolve the issue and the parliamentary elections were held first and selected the president. In those elections the MDF won a plurality and formed a government.24 Impact on Post-Extrication Political Actors Both the Polish and Hungarian extrication processes included a combination of intense contention and negotiation. Of all the post-communist cases, it was in these two that the opposition both had a relatively developed organizational capacity and the ability to strategically protest in struggles with the party-state. The ability of the communist incumbents to negotiate and persist in the face of the uncertain outcomes of those processes showed that they still had the ability to evolve and respond effectively to rapidly changing political environments. Their ability to do so combined with the resource advantages they enjoyed as ruling party successors allowed them to expunge hardline elements, make new allies, and remake themselves as reformist social democratic parties.25 Their effectiveness was attested to by their ability to rebound, win elections, and form governments in 1993 in Poland and in 1994 in Hungary. The recovery of these parties was consequential for subsequent developments. Both the Polish and Hungarian postcommunist successor parties, 23. András Bozóki, "Post-Communist Transition: Political Tendencies in Hungary," East European Politics and Societies 4, no. 2 (March 1990): 211-30. 24. Rudolf Tokés, Hungary's Negotiated Revolution: Economic Reform, Social Change, and Political Succession, 1957-1990 (Cambridge, Eng., 1996): 363-65, 385-88. 25. Anna Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming the Communist Past: The Regeneration of Communist Successor Parties in East Central Europe after 1989 (Cambridge, Eng., 2002). https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2021.145 Published online by Cambridge University Press Democratic Backsliding in Poland and Hungary 593 the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) and Hungarian Socialist Party (MSzP), adopted programs supporting democratic and market reform, and membership in NATO and the European Union. This also meant that the ability of the opposition to distinguish itself from the main postcommunist successor party on programmatic grounds was now highly constrained. The literature on transitions, especially if one considers the Polish process as one that extended from 1989-91 and the breakdown of the Hungarian Roundtable, overstates the unity of the opposition to the regime. The account above highlights important areas of contention within the opposition in both countries during the extrication process on tactical and temperamental grounds. Further, once extrication was complete, the need for solidarity by the opposition against the regime or its successors was no longer necessary for political survival. This led to a diversity of post-oppositional parties that competed with each other and the communist successor parties. The pattern of electoral competition and government formation in both countries settled into alternation between postcommunist-led and opposition-led coalitions. This also meant that in order to form governments post-oppositional political actors needed to distinguish themselves to win elections, lead governments, and claim portfolios in the cabinet. The nature of the contentious but negotiated extrications led to the opening up of a specific discursive space into which political actors willing to take what has been labelled a memory warrior stance hostile to the transition process were able to cultivate a stable constituency and compete for power in durable fashion following the extrication process.26 The strategy of the memory warriors was to discredit the foundation of democracy by claiming that the negative effects of communism persisted despite the "purported" transition to democracy, thus delegitimizing the current system and political actors implicated in its origin. In this rhetoric a true democratic transition did not take place because a corrupt deal was struck between the communists, who were frenetically trying to defend their power and privilege as the system collapsed, and the members of the opposition who negotiated with them, purportedly continuing to collaborate with them in a pact of mutual enrichment. This rotten deal denied the true fruits of democracy and economic transformation to "real" Poles and Hungarians.27 This rhetoric strongly aligns with the notion of ideologically thin populism that partitions society into a corrupt elite, which takes advantage of some sort of invented, pure people who embody a purported general will.28 What is unique about these populists, compared to others in the region, is that they emerged out of the democratic 26. Kubik and Bernhard, "A Theory of the Politics of Memory," in Bernhard and Kubik, eds., Twenty Years After Communism, 15. 27. Bernhard and Kubik, "Roundtable Discord: The Contested Legacy of 1989 in Poland," 60-85; and Anna Seleny, "Revolutionary Road: 1956 and the Fracturing of Hungarian Historical Memory," 37-59, in Bernhard and Kubik, eds., Twenty Years After Communism. 28. Mudde, "The Populist Zeitgeist." For an overview of populism in the postcommunist space see the introduction to the "Critical Forum: Global Populism" published in this journal: Anna Grzymala-Busse, "Introduction," Slavic Review 76, Supplement SI (August 2017), S1-S2, at doi.org/10.1017/slr.2017.151 (accessed August 9, 2021). https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2021.145 Published online by Cambridge University Press 594 Slavic Review opposition as a consequence of transitions that combined contention and accommodation. Accommodation provided the grievance and contention provided a form of political capital conducive to pursuing it. Five aspects of the Polish and Hungarian extrications gave rise to this discursive space conducive to a memory warrior stance vis-a-vis transition. First, the initiation of extrication via Roundtable Negotiations opened up the possibility to cast the outcome as a rotten deal in which part of the opposition and the communists divided the spoils. By their very nature negotiations necessitate compromise and the confining of maximalists to the sidelines. This opened the post-extrication order to the charge that it was an incomplete or corrupt revolution, which instead of creating a "true" democratic order enriched a select group of oppositionists who agreed to shield the interests of the communists for a share of the spoils. Second, the divisions on the post-oppositional side of the political spectrum provided incentives for the weaker political parties on the right to radicalize. In particular, the marginalization of maximalists provided no incentive for moderation. Third, the emergence and persistence of strong postcommunist social democratic parties made the pattern of alternation in power by post-communist and opposition-derived political parties possible. This lent some "face plausibility" to the rotten deal narrative inasmuch as parties often founded and staffed by former opposition moderates, as well as regime reformers continued to rule. Fourth, the adoption of the democratic, pro-market, and pro-western agenda of the opposition by the postcommunist successor parties created a highly constrained set of postcommunist policy choices from which voters could choose. This led many voters to give credence to the narrative that transition was crooked inasmuch as it offered highly constrained policy choices. Fifth, given the tradition of contentious political engagement which played a decisive role in their extrications from communism, the capacity of these societies for contentious politics provided the proponents of the rotten deal/incomplete revolution narrative other means to push their agenda even when they were marginalized from state institutions. In Hungary, the actor that came to occupy this space was Fidesz, which soon after extrication became the main party of the Hungarian center-right and the most effective competition to the communist successor party, the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSzP). In Poland this was Law and Justice (PiS), led by the Kaczyhski brothers, and the parties of the Solidarity right that preceded it. On several occasions these parties played an important role in the post-Solidarity party coalitions that alternated in power with the communist successor party, the Alliance of the Democratic Left (SLD). Until recently, PiS and its predecessors fared worse than their liberal and centrist competitors from Solidarity, such as Freedom Union (UW) and Civic Platform (PO). The discourse of both Fidesz and PiS even before the current populist backlash against liberal democracy had begun to incorporate interwar and wartime nationalist rhetoric back into the national political culture. This has been most explicit in Hungary, where Trianon has been rehabilitated as a defining national grievance and an ideology of shared fate with Hungarian minorities in neighboring states. This reassertion of elements from aggressive interwar nationalism has begun to explicitly include rehabilitation of reactionary, https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2021.145 Published online by Cambridge University Press Democratic Backsliding in Poland and Hungary 595 wartime collaborationist political actors, as well as Holocaust revisionism and denial. The reemergence of anti-democratic rightwing traditions, the condemnation of the democratic revolutions of 1989, the embrace of illiberalism, and the cultivation of new varieties of xenophobia have all worked to create a politics that is confrontational in opposition and ruthless in power. The paths that both parties took to illiberal populism were somewhat different. PiS had lived in the discursive space of rotten revolution since its outset. Its origins go back to the war at the top in Solidarity over whether the union should challenge General Jaruzelski's legitimacy to hold the presidency. The Kaczyhski Brothers founded their first party—the Center Compact (PC)— to support Lech Walesa's push for the presidency in 1990. After a moderately strong showing in the parliamentary elections of 1991, it led the Olszewski coalition government (December 1991 to June 1992), which unsuccessfully attempted to weaponize the secret police archives and rapidly fell from power. They also took part in the Solidarity Electoral Action (AWS) alliance that brought Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek to power. The coalition joined together Solidarity liberals, moderates, and conservatives in a single government for one last time from 1997-2001. For the elections of 2001, the Kaczyhski brothers broke with former allies and assembled a coalition of conservative factions into Law and Justice (PiS). Following another round of SLD rule, PiS emerged as the strongest party following the elections of 2005 and formed two shortlived governments from 2005-7. This election marked the eclipse of the SLD which found itself fully discredited by a series of corruption scandals. With this the postcommunist left lost its broad electoral appeal and a new Polish left of consequence has yet to reemerge. Electoral politics in Poland became a contest between post-Solidarity political forces. In early elections in 2007 PiS lost to their more moderate, liberal Solidarity competitors, the Civic Platform (PO). PO ruled from 2008-15 and was the first party to win two consecutive parliamentary elections in Poland (PiS replicated this in 2019). It was during this period that PiS began its aggressive attempt to discredit the legacy of the events of 1989, in particular the Roundtable Negotiations. Initially the memory warrior stance was not an effective strategy for returning to power.29 Why it became so and was able to support a successful illiberal backlash is a subject to which I will return following the discussion of Fidesz in Hungary. Whereas PiS and its predecessors have occupied a relatively consistent position in the party spectrum in Poland, Fidesz has gone through a number of transformations in Hungary. It began as a party of liberal youth and then became a party of the center-right. After a disappointing performance in the elections of 1994, it changed its name to Fidesz—Hungarian Civic Party (Fidesz-MPP), breaking with the liberal international and growing more conservative over time. Unlike PiS and its predecessors, it was the most successful post-opposition party in its country. Whereas its competitors—the Free Democratic Union (SzDSz) and the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF)— faded, Fidesz transformed itself into a broad catchall party that consistently 29. Bernhard and Kubik, "Roundtable Discord," 60-85. https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2021.145 Published online by Cambridge University Press 596 Slavic Review challenged the postcommunist Hungarian Socialist Party (MSzP) from the late 1990s throughout the 2000s. Since 2010 it has become a hegemonic party. Viktor Orban's first stint as Prime Minister came in 1998 to 2002 and was followed by two close losses to the MSzP in 2002 and 2006. Its loss in 2006 led to a further radicalization of Fidesz. The MSzP became the first party to win consecutive elections in postcommunist Hungary, but did so because the Prime Minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, blatantly and knowingly lied about the state of the economy on the cusp of the election. It was at this point Fidesz began its transformation from conservatism to illiberalism. From Reactionary Discursive Space to Illiberal Government The path to this populist national conservative form of illiberal rule was made possible not only by the existence of the discursive space on the right, which I have argued was a product of the path of extrication from communism in both countries, but a set of facilitating structural changes as well. While both Fidesz and PiS were successful in occupying this space, taking a memory warrior stance against the exit from communism only brought them intermittent success until the 2010s. It is important to remember that prior to their current accessions to power, both had lost two consecutive general elections. Three structural developments were essential to their reversal of fortune. First, and quite counterintuitively, was the entry of both countries into the European Union in 2004. When countries seek accession into the EU their compliance with a set of legal and institutional norms (the Copenhagen criteria) are closely monitored and if they do not comply, they are not admitted. Once they are admitted into the EU their compliance with its fundamental norms is not subject to decisive enforcement mechanisms. At this point political actors who were reticent to break with EU political norms because of the cost were now freer to do so because the ability of member states to diverge from or even flaunt EU norms is much greater than that of candidate states.30 Further, two recent exogenous shocks have also played an important role in making the memory warrior stance that both parties have assumed more valuable. Here, of course, I refer to the global financial crisis and the subsequent great recession (2007-9), and to the influx of a large number of Muslim refugees from failed states such as Syria, Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan into Europe that reached crisis proportions in the summer of 2015. The narrative of failed revolutions in 1989 gained credence as global liberalism and EU membership, to which postcommunist Poland and Hungary had aspired, failed to protect Europe from a deep economic crisis and provoked a wave of xenophobia as millions of refugees flooded into the Schengen area. The rehabilitation of past national narratives of ethno-national xenophobia and arguments for protecting citizens against the uncertainties of the market gave both parties solid governing majorities that have allowed them to undertake their 30. R. Daniel Kelemen, "Europe's Other Democratic Deficit: National Authoritarianism in Europe's Democratic Union," Government and Opposition 52, no. 2 (April 2017): 211-38. https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2021.145 Published online by Cambridge University Press Democratic Backsliding in Poland and Hungary 597 illiberal agendas.31 The betrayed revolution memory warrior narrative was expanded to encompass global liberalism and the Brussels-based elite, and began to assert an illiberal European identity that poses traditional values in opposition to western decadence. Increasingly, politicians on the right depict Brussels as an imperial center that seeks to impose cosmopolitan values on the traditionally-oriented populations of the region. Fidesz's slide into illiberalism began with its electoral loss in 2006. This led to an extensive campaign of civil disobedience and protest by Fidesz supporters and rightwing youth, who clashed violently with the police outside Parliament. It was during this period that the previously marginal ultra-right party Jobbik also began to gain strength. Protests began on September 17, 2006, after the release of a taped conversation where Prime Minister Gyurcsány admitted to lying about the state and prospects for the economy during the previous electoral campaign. Fidesz's ability to engage in this sustained campaign of protest was based on a long-term strategy of investing in civic organization at the grassroots level through the creation of an extensive network of Civic Circles following its electoral defeat in 2002.32 Protest was concentrated in the main square outside Parliament and continued for over a month until October 23, the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The protests garnered large crowds, an estimated 40,000 participants on September 18, demanding the resignation of the prime minister and the government. That evening a riot ensued when a group of protestors attempted to seize the national television studios, leading to dozens injured and extensive property damage. During this period there were also protests in smaller cities such as Miskolc, Szeged, Eger, Pecs, Debrecen, Szécsény, Békéscsaba, Salgótarján, and Nyíregyháza.33 The largest protests occurred on October 23, the anniversary of the outbreak of the Revolution of 1956. Street battles ensued when the police attempted to clear Kossuth Square by Parliament in the early morning hours. This led to separate commemorations by the government and Fidesz at different locations in the city later in the day. Fidesz and its allies held a rally at the Hotel Astoria, an area of intense fighting in 1956, which drew a crowd estimated at 100,000. In his speech, Orbán drew parallels between government lies in 1956 and 2006 and accused the MSzP of being no better than the former ruling communists. Things got rough again in the evening with rioting and destruction of property, and the use of water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets by police. The demonstrations began to ebb from this point 31. For a discussion of the many complex aspects of the refugee crisis in the postcommunist space see the "Critical Forum: The East European Response to the 2015 Migration Crisis" published in this journal. An overview is provided by Zsuzsa Gille, "Introduction: From Comparison to Relationality," Slavic Review 76, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 285-90. 32. Béla Greskovits, "Rebuilding the Hungarian Right through Conquering Civil Society: The Civic Circles Movement," East European Politics 36, no. 2 (June 2020): 247-66. 33. Csepeli Gyorgy, Gonczol Katalin, Gyorgyi Kálmán, Halmai Gábor, Kacziba Antal, Ormos Mária, Pataki Ferenc, Tóth Judit, and Vorosmarti Mihály, Vizsgálati jelentés a 2006. szeptember-októberi fóvárosi demonstrációkkal, utcai rendzavarásokkal és rendfenntartó intézkedésekkel kapcsolatos eseményekról (Budapest, 2007), at gonczolbizottsag.gov.hu/ jelentes/gonczolbizottsag_jelentes.pdf (accessed August 9, 2021). https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2021.145 Published online by Cambridge University Press 598 Slavic Review III 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 iii ClAlCnaiCTlClOlCTlOOOOOOOOQ