The People, Power, Politics podcast

00:00:00 Intro Jingle

Welcome to the People Power Politics Podcast, brought to you by CEDAR, the Center for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham.

00:00:14 Licia Cianetti

Hi everyone and thanks for joining us. I'm Licia Cianetti, deputy director of CEDAR, and I'm your host today. I am delighted to welcome to the podcast Milada Anna Vachudova and Tim Haughton for joining us from my office in Birmingham. Milada is Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She's the author of the seminal book ‘Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage and Integration after Communism’, and she's one of the leading experts on political change in post-Communist Europe. And Tim is Professor of Comparative and European politics and Deputy Co-director of CEDAR here at the University of Birmingham. He's the co-author of ‘The New Party Challenge: Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond’, and has written extensively about Central and Eastern European party politics and especially about the politics of Slovakia. So welcome both to the podcast.

00:01:04 Tim Haughton

Thank you very much.

00:01:05 Milada Anna Vachudova

It's wonderful to be here.

00:01:07 Licia Cianetti

So it's become almost impossible to talk about Central Europe or Central and Eastern Europe without wondering what went wrong with democracy in the region. Of course, Hungary under Viktor Orban had the most troubling trajectory. You know, early democratisation success story, then followed by this steep decline to the extent that now Hungary is not considered a full democracy anymore. Recent events in Slovakia, with the return of Robert Fico, also what happened after the attempt to his life are also quite worrying, but we also know that most of the countries in the region do not resemble Hungary. And at the same time there is this persistent sense that something is not quite right with democracy in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. Now we'll leave the comparisons for later in the podcast, but first I wanted to ask both of you what your diagnosis is. So what, if anything, do you think is going wrong with democracy in Central and Eastern Europe? So maybe Milada do you want to start?

00:02:08 Milada Anna Vachudova

Yeah. Thank you, and this is a great question to start on. I think first of all, voters in post-Communist countries are new to democracy, right? These are relatively young democracies. And I think what we saw was that the kind of appeals that Viktor Orban is so well known for, this kind of victimhood, this kind of blaming it on a transnational cabal of liberals and cosmopolitan elites, and also on internal minorities and people who he labeled as culturally harmful – these kinds of appeals, I call them ethno-populist appeals, they seem to have gotten a lot of traction in Central and Eastern European countries. And so we see that kind of appeal win elections in Slovakia and Slovenia and the Czech Republic and Poland and then that's step one.

00:03:03 Milada Anna Vachudova

Those appeals have a lot of traction there, but they've also have appeals and also have traction in Western Europe and in the US obviously, and then step two is that the institutions are weaker and it's been easier for incumbents whose goal it is to concentrate power and push the opposition out and create an uneven playing field, it's been easier for them to do that.

00:03:27 Tim Haughton

Yeah, so I mean, I would very much agree with with what Milada said. Maybe a couple of things that I would, I would add in to the discussion. I think firstly, it is worth bearing in mind what has happened over the last few years. The challenges associated with the pandemic, the cost of living crisis, I think this has really raised the challenge of governability, actually governing well and delivering on the goods. I think this is a factor that's been very important in raising the bar in the region. But I think there's also a problem or challenge, and I know we're going to come back and talk about comparative questions later on: I would say this is a general problem that democracies face, which is the kind of bonds between the government and those whom they govern over, those bonds are quite frayed, they're not particularly strong, and I think that's one of the one of the challenges. And particularly as a scholar of party politics, if you think about, you know, the role that political parties are supposed to play in terms of linkage, about aggregation, about representation, I think political parties are are not performing those functions as well as possible, because they have that important role. I think this is part of the problem that that democracies face.

00:04:40 Tim Haughton

I would just want to say one thing though, which I think is important. Milada is absolutely right to say in the grand scheme of things, these are relatively young democracies still, and I think, you know, if we were to turn the clock back to ‘89 or the early 1990s and then look at today, we would probably say it's a glass half full or a glass half empty depending whether a positive or negative viewpoints, but there's been a lot of progress over the past three decades, and I think at times that's also really important to state.

00:05:11 Licia Cianetti

Yes, definitely. So I wanted to bring the conversation to some articles that you recently published. So Tim and some co-authors you looked at elections in Poland, Slovakia and your different paper you looked at Slovenia and you kind of asked about the changing fortunes of the liberal parties in this countries and what that means for the prospects of democratic backsliding or democratic recovery and resilience.

00:05:35 Licia Cianetti

Well, Milada, you you recently co-edited a special section in the Journal of East European Politics and Societies that looks at civic mobilisations against democratic backsliding. So to me, these are kind of two sides of the same story. So what I’d like you to do is to both tell their side of this story and then maybe comment on how the two stories, so the mobilisation, bottom-up story and the top-down Party stories, how they come together, how they interact. So maybe this time we start with Tim, we start with the Party story and then we see what happens from the bottom up.

00:06:10 Tim Haughton

Great. Well, thank you. Yes. So I think I would maybe make three or four comments here. So the first thing that I think is important is a lot of the explanation for those elections, you mentioned that we looked at Poland, we looked at Slovakia, we looked at Slovenia, we've also looked at Bulgaria with with some other colleagues as well – it's important that these elections are often a a reaction, a reaction against those politicians that are in power. So in the Polish case, it was a reaction against the Law and Justice led government, that helps explain the success of a politician like Tusk. Or if we look at Slovakia, it was a reaction against the government that ruled over Slovakia from 2020 until kind of the end of 2022, beginning of 2023, the Matovič and Heger government. So in part it's a reaction. That's actually quite normal in, in, in politics, but worth emphasising.

00:07:06 Tim Haughton

And crucially, two key beneficiaries of that, Tusk and Fico, they played on their experience, their governability, to link in with what we talked about in the last question. The second point that I I think is important to to factor in here are actually electoral system effects, and we see the way in which politicians have learned to some extent how to play the particular electoral systems. So if we take the case of Slovakia, for example, what's really important is the coalition that came into power would not have come into being without the the third party, the Slovak National Party, essentially having a particular strategy to put individuals from outside the party onto their party list and using that and the process of preference voting to actually get over the electoral threshold.

00:07:58 Tim Haughton

Third thing that I think I would emphasise is how important, kind of, newness still remains. So Slovenia is the kind of best example of this: 4th election, some might even argue the 5th election in a row in Slovenia where the appeal of newness was very important. But also what I think is worth emphasising, in the Slovene case, we saw real evidence there of a kind of bandwagon effect that that support coalesced around Robert Golob and his freedom movement because it was seen to be the most effective electoral vehicle to defeat Janez Janša. And if there's one kind of emerging theme of elections I think in the region, it's that there's often a kind of strong ‘against vote’ against a particular individual and a particular party, whether we think of Kaczyński in Poland, Babiš in the Czech Republic, Janša in Slovenia, Fico in Slovakia, or Borissov in Bulgaria, for example. I could go on and talk for for longer but I know Milada has some great things to say. Maybe I can come back and say a couple of things after that.

00:09:04 Milada Anna Vachudova

Yeah, great. Thank you. Yeah, we worked for years on the special section and it all started, I think it was really inspired by something that our colleague and friend Antoaneta Dimitrova at Leiden observed in one of her articles, which is that, you know, you look across at Central and Eastern Europe and you can see backsliding governments, incumbents concentrating power, and you can see that as a weakness of democracy, but you can also look across and see all of the protests and all of the civic mobilisation in defense of liberal democracy and see that as a strength, see that as showing that these are democratic polities that have resilience and that have citizen participation.

00:09:51 Milada Anna Vachudova

So I edited this special section with Adam Fagan at King’s College and Danijela Dolenec at the University of Zagreb, and I think our greatest kind of insight as we were reading all the papers and having the workshop was really showing how in each of these cases, civic mobilisation happened in different ways, different actors, different coalitions. But it was always kind of against all odds, citizens who cared deeply about defending liberal democracy in one way or another. We went a little bit more deep on this question in a co-authored paper in the special section with Antoaneta Dimitrova and Courtney Blackington, where we actually asked protesters in Poland, Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Romania, like, why do they protest and how do they, you know, do they feel like their protests mattered when obviously the government didn't see their protests and say, oh, of course I'm going to change policies?

00:10:56 Milada Anna Vachudova

And what was, two things really interesting from this survey: first of all, respondents in Poland and the Czech Republic had a very different solution to the problems in their country than Bulgaria and Romania. In Poland and a little less so in Czech Republic, the participants were like, we just need to get rid of this government and then our democracy will go back to being fine. Not perfect, but fine, whereas in Bulgaria and Romania the protesters said, look government, this government could fall, the next government could fall, we need to go back and reform some of the systems that have been in place since 1989.

00:11:35 Milada Anna Vachudova

But what all the protesters had in common was that when you asked, you know, what do you see as the biggest benefit of the fact that you protested? It's that they wanted to demonstrate to other citizens that to be a citizen of democracy means getting off the couch and raising public awareness about issues that threaten individual and group rights and threaten democratic institutions. You know, when you look across the region, I sometimes think, right, how we talk about European integration, that those that believe the most in the EU are often in the borderlands, on the edges, trying to come in.

00:12:16 Milada Anna Vachudova

There's something to say about democracy in that sense, too. I mean, if you look at the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine in 2014, it was both the biggest pro EU rally that the world has ever seen. I mean, people were literally there mobilising for Ukraine, moving towards the EU, but it was also an enormous anti-corruption, pro-democracy rally. Another example close to my heart is the Czechs, right, where the mobilisation of, well, the leaders were PhD students who were ABD. So the power of the PhD student that doesn't want to finish their dissertation or do something else, they mobilise this nationwide movement called Million Moments for Democracy and managed to set up that little office or at least a contact in just about every village and town in all of the Czech Republic, and mobilised against Babiš.

00:13:12 Milada Anna Vachudova

And what was great about that movement was that it was almost anticipatory. Like Babiš had done some things which certainly qualified as democratic backsliding, but he kind of wanted to do a whole bunch more, and these protests were like, I liken them to kind of a seminar in Comparative Government, you know, there would be like a pop star and then there would be this PhD student explaining to tens of thousands of people why you need counter-majoritarian institutions or what are minority rights. So that was really, I mean, I think an exceptional effort and kind of shows the power of citizens who really care about their democracies.

00:13:54 Licia Cianetti

Yeah. And this is kind of great also because it's a part of the story that tends to be forgotten. We look at the backsliding, we look at kind of what the autocratisers do, but there is a little bit less attention about the fact that, especially across Eastern Europe, we've seen some of the biggest protests since 1989 across many of these countries. So this is kind of a big part of this story. But as you both were speaking, that made me think about one of the kind of issues that always comes up when we think about the crisis of democracy across pretty much all of the democratic world, which is polarisation. And so I kind of wanted to know in kind of these two sides of the story how that comes in. So we're seeing kind of attempts at very polarising kind of language and rhetoric from politicians and maybe Tim can say a little bit more about that, but how does it reflect then on the streets in terms of what people, what kind of people mobilise, are there counter-mobilisations and are there kind of visible signs of polarisation also on the streets or on interpersonal levels?

00:14:58 Tim Haughton

Absolutely. I think this kind of polarisation issue is important, I was mentioning about how in in a number of those countries, it's a kind of, ‘against someone’ is often the, central kind of to the nature of Party competition in in those countries. And I think what's important here is the way in which the choices are often framed, and they're framed in such a way to kind of say that the only way that we can achieve a particular outcome is by using this kind of rhetoric and moving the appeal down a particular path.

00:15:28 Tim Haughton

So a lot of the, a lot of the elections we we saw that kind of framing to kind of say, you know it, it's our way or the highway to hell as it were. And it's one of those two choices. In some senses you always get that in, in, in elections. But I think it's kind of been heightened because of a sense that the choices really matter. I mean, one of the, you know, we can argue that all elections are critical on one level, but it feels like that almost every election in Central and Eastern Europe is made into a kind of critical choice. So the last Polish election, what was really important in terms of the outcome was the mobilisation of a lot of voters, the turnout was really high in Poland, and a lot of that mobilisation was essentially saying to that part of the electorate, you know, if if you don't come out and turn out and vote for these parties, Poland is going, you know, its chances of ever returning to being a full liberal democracy are gonna be gone forever. And it's that sort of, you know, raising the stakes during the framing, which I think is is, is really important and helps to kind of fuel that polarisation.

00:16:37 Milada Anna Vachudova

I would put it a little bit differently because, like, if the parties that are mainstream haven't changed their position, or if anything they've moved a bit to the right, and yet we have this blossoming of parties that are on mostly on the far right, but you know a little bit on the far left, like Mélenchon in France, you know, the centre, the centre... like polarisation sort of assumes that the two sides have each gone to their corner. But I would argue that what we have are actually kind of regime elections where you have a set of quote-unquote ‘democratic parties’ that can span from kind of Hayekian right on the economy to very far left on the economy, but who all defend liberal democratic institutions. And they're sort of the pro-democracy parties. And then you have the populist, ethno-populist far right, this sort of subversive, anti-democracy camp.

00:17:35 Milada Anna Vachudova

So in the Czech elections, for example, we now have a coalition between the Pirate Party, which should be a very liberal libertarian party with the ODS, run by someone who's a bit like Mitt Romney. And I'm not happy about that because, you know, I may not agree with all their policy positions, but they're kind of small seat conservative and they believe in conserving the liberal democratic institutions. Also, you know the Polish Peasant Party, not really a paragon of progress, but part of that coalition of parties that are on the democratic side. So is it a good outcome? No. It's terrible to have elections being fought between a group of parties that believe in maintaining democratic institutions and those that want to turn them down.

00:18:27 Milada Anna Vachudova

But we're moving that way in Western Europe and in the United States, obviously. So that's not only an East European phenomenon. I wish much more that we were had contesting these elections on policy issues, right, on taxation and spending, education, but that's not the trend, and the trend isn't, you know, as I said, not just in post-Communist Europe. We are launching very soon, in many inboxes in 2024, the new Chapel Hill expert survey. So by the end of 2024, we should have new data, probably publicly available in very early 2025. So we can check in on all of our parties and see where they are on all those different policy issues and enormous thanks to everyone who fills out their survey, looking at both of you!

00:19:18 Licia Cianetti

If we go back to the streets then, does this polarisation or the politics becoming about maintaining the institutions? Is there a group of people that would go to the streets in support of the, let's call them autocratisers or ethno-populists? Have you seen that kind of confrontation also coming out in the streets? So those are people just going to express their vote and support in that way.

00:19:44 Milada Anna Vachudova

It does come out in the street. I mean, in Prague, for example, in 2024, we've had both pro- and anti-Ukraine support demonstrations, you know on different days but there’s no question that ethno-populists have the ability to mobilise people and to put on a big demonstration. I mean Orbán is a case in point I think. I haven't seen anything like Trump, who calls for revolution in the streets, or I believe he said a bloodbath if if the Republicans were to lose the elections. I'm not aware of any of that kind of speech on the part of the ethno-populists or anti-democratic incumbents, but that I might have not seen it. What about you Tim?

00:20:29 Tim Haughton

Not not to that extent, but I would, I would certainly say that we do see mobilisation on that supportive of the autocratisers or backsliders or however we want to, to label them. We do see that, but it's often linked in with specific kind of issues as a kind of mobilising force to say, you know, we need to, we need this legislative measure x in order to, to improve society, so it's often less kind of just demonstrating your support for those in power in total and more about a specific kind of measure and essentially saying that the opposition is trying to kind of undermine that necessary step that the country needs to take.

00:21:13 Milada Anna Vachudova

And just quickly, Courtney Blackington, my former PhD student, who is now an assistant professor, she did a lot of really interesting interviews with protesters in Poland on both sides. And so she's written five or six articles about that, so I really recommend all of them. But one of the things she found is that on the right or, you know, supporters of PiS, people were strongly Catholic in Poland. Sometimes the ways that the PiS Party would try to mobilise them wouldn't work because they were using all this very kind of disgust rhetoric about the LGBT community, which actually had the impact of kind of making people withdraw, not, like, go out in the streets. So it's sort of interesting, we don’t know.

00:21:59 Milada Anna Vachudova

One thing I'll say for Central Europe: when these folks have lost elections, they've pretty much left quietly. Am I right? I'm just thinking. I mean the United States, we're we're big achievers, right, and all of these like we had we didn't, you know, Trump did not leave quietly. We had January 6th, but I can't think of an equivalent of that in Poland or Czech, you know, in the Czech Republic, Babiš left very quietly... in Poland, you know, they were not happy about it but they didn't try anything like that.

00:22:33 Tim Haughton

Yeah, I think so. And I think that's partly because they think that there's a chance that they will come back through democratic means. You know, the if if if you take my argument about reaction and and and reactive elections and if you take the point I make about kind of delivery being important, you know if you wanted to bet today, you would probably imagine that PiS, Babiš, anti-Fico forces, whoever are likely to win the next election, there there does tend to be a kind of pendulum. I mean one of the points that maybe I should have made at the beginning of the podcast is, you know, incumbency is quite hard in in Central and Eastern Europe. I think that's one of the the motive forces of of elections and party politics.

00:23:18 Licia Cianetti

So you've already mentioned Ukraine once and I wanted to kind of move to that briefly. So this is another inescapable context for politics everywhere, but in Central and Eastern Europe in particular, the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine and there is this ongoing war of aggression. So how is this, the war, but also the economic effects of that, and also refugees from Ukraine coming to the region, how are all these effects of the war and the war itself, and the politics around it played out in in the region. Because again, I have the impression that people mostly hear about Orbán's position and then maybe they assume that that's the position across the region.

00:24:00 Milada Anna Vachudova

Yeah, I can just start by saying like in the early days of the war in Central and Eastern Europe, but also in Western Europe, I felt like this was really the first time that the EU had a foreign policy goal: help Ukraine, and was asking EU citizens to kind of sacrifice for that goal and EU citizens were saying yes, you know, we'll wear a sweater for Ukraine and you know. So it was the mobilisation, had a really, I think, a unifying effect and showed us that it's possible for EU, the EU, to move towards a common foreign policy in the future. Now there are a lot of hiccups along the road. I think that in Central European countries, it's a mystery to me how Orbán can be pro-Putin, given the history right? In in the Czech Republic, in Poland and elsewhere, there's a kind of natural like, yeah, we also have been invaded by Soviet Russian tanks. You know, we were always afraid of Russia, the the Baltic countries in the 90s said we really want to get into NATO because we fear Russia and the Americans were like, don't say that, just say you love America and you want to get into NATO. So this kind of abiding fear of Russia and thinking it's just being quiet for a little while and we'll be back.

00:25:18 Milada Anna Vachudova

And then the the the huge amount of evidence that we've had since, I don't know, 2000, since 2014, certainly that Russia was very aggressive. But in the in the minute here in 2024, there's also producer interest within the EU and the longer the war has gone, the more EU producers, particularly farmers, have essentially said we refuse to allow Ukrainian agricultural products to come into the EU quota- and tariff-free. So you have Polish farmers blockading the border, you have also French farmers up in arms. I think Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia as well so, so lots of solidarity, but when it comes to farmers, no. So there's been a compromise. The Commission has had to back down and allow for these quotas and it really reminds me of the 1990s, right, when the EU said to the East, to Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia: here's your first association agreement with the EU. You have to open up your economies entirely to EU goods. Oh, but we're going to close our, the EU internal market to those things that you're actually really competitive and sorry, no agricultural steel, textiles and chemicals. So, you know, the EU is primarily an internal market and it's a work in progress when it comes to foreign policy and the Ukrainian farming and the Ukrainian economy is really suffering actually right now because of that.

00:26:47 Tim Haughton

Yeah, I mean, I would want to to pick up, so I think we can talk about a, kind of, the Ukraine war, essentially bringing a a set of civilizational questions and about kind of where you belong. And that's particularly in the early part of the conflict. I know the conflict in Ukraine has gone for a long time. If we just focus on since the full-scale invasion, it's that sort of civilization, you know, where do you stand? And you know that was very striking for example, in the Slovak presidential election, that sort of came out about, you know, where do you, you know, where do you want the country to go? We also see how the war has reinforced certain ideological positions of certain politicians. So Slovak National Party, for example, very strong kind of pro-Russian, always been historically very kind of Russophilic and they continue to be, and they're very happy to be seen to be close to Russia on that.

00:27:49 Tim Haughton

But then secondly, sort of picking up on what Milada was saying, there's also then a sort of practical level of politics and how it's played out and what we then see is that political actors have started, or some have used the involvement as a way of tying that Western involvement to the challenges that ordinary people face. So pointing out the fact that the cost of living crisis has a lot to do with the impact of of the war. And that was used for political gain, for example by Fico quite effectively in the 2023 election. And I I think actually Fico is a really interesting case to look at here. You know, I mean, I was in Slovakia during the election campaign. I went to a couple of rallies of Fico, and what's interesting is the way in which he was always trying to say, look, what's happening in Ukraine is a tragedy and we are not supportive of that. We want peace because it will be good for the Ukrainians.

00:28:48 Tim Haughton

The conflict is bad because it hurts ordinary Slovaks, who have to kind of pay for it with the consequences. But crucially as well, the Slovak governments see that there are actually quite nice business opportunities linked in with the conflict, so you know, there was a meeting between the Slovak Government and the Ukrainian Government in Michalovce in the far East of Slovakia, and it was all about energy deals and infrastructure deals and it was, you know, it was all driven by business and business interests. And there's an awful lot of politicians in the region who see the business benefits that can come from from conflict, which is a slightly sad point to make, but an important point to make.

00:29:35 Licia Cianetti

Yeah. So we are, you know, coming close to the end, but I wanted to ask a last question slash questions. So we started with the diagnosis, and it's more complex, of course, than just saying backsliding. But what do you think is the cure if a cure is needed? Is the EU part of it or part of the problem? And then related to that, and kind of expanding on some of the comparative snippets already come from some of your answers, do you think that the political dynamics that we're seeing now in the Central Europe and Eastern Europe are unique to the region, so they are some sort of post-Communist pathology, they’re specific to the region, or are they part of a wider democratic trend that goes beyond the region, and also the solutions we like to look at this kind of wider issue, wider problem, wider trend?

00:30:23 Milada Anna Vachudova

Well, a cure, I mean, coming back to Russia’s war against Ukraine, you know, just an incredibly tragic event, tens of thousands of Ukrainians have died. Cities and towns, many completely reduced to rubble, particularly the ones that Putin claimed he was there to protect. But there have been, I think, some positive consequences of this for European politics. I mean, NATO obviously has found its purpose, but I think also a sense of, as Tim said like, who are we? What is the place of European values and liberal democracy in European integration?

00:31:05 Milada Anna Vachudova

So at this particular moment, you know, the EU is unable to move against Orbán because of the unanimity rule and so forth. But they're starting to really work on it. They're starting to really understand that if European integration is decoupled from liberal democracy, which is what Orbán wants, and Sophie Meunier and I are argued this years and years ago and the response was like, oh, Orbán’s not that bad, well, I think the whole world has finally realised Orbán is that bad because he wants to eliminate liberal democracy as a foundation of the European Union. The reason I think that might be part of the cure is that you know, once you have to fight for something, you develop allies. You set an agenda, you you prioritise it.

00:31:49 Milada Anna Vachudova

And so part of the cure could be the EU as an institution and more, you know, parties in European party systems really prioritising and centring politics around this question of defending liberal democracy. The problem is that the other side plays really dirty, you know it's really hard for mainstream politicians to use kind of gentle discourse, policy issues, et cetera, to confront this kind of disinformation, hate mongering that you see from not just the far right, but parties that we call right wing populist or I call ethno-populist. It's very, you can't counter that, you can see that today, like with the many kind of interactions, they're sort of speaking past each other. And so we expect the Czech government to fall, to lose the next election, this this pro-democracy government, because they can't really match the appeals of the ethno-populists.

00:32:51 Milada Anna Vachudova

But one possible cure, I think, is to put more emotion in politics, like that's what the populists and ethno-populists have, is this, like the emotional. So try to put more emotion in the mainstream politics. You know, Macron was supposed to be a little bit like that, the the mainstream populist that made us believe in Europe again. Do I think it's post-Communist? I don't. I mean, I think these appeals, as I've mentioned, the same kinds of appeals that vilify a kind of transnational international institution, some liberal cabal, usually George Soros, is involved, and demonised certain cultural groups domestically that are deemed culturally harmful. Migrants, refugees, Muslims, minorities. That is, I think, as much in Western Europe, but maybe even rising, whereas it may have kind of leveled off in the East. And I think what Tim said was really important, this alternation of power.

00:33:52 Milada Anna Vachudova

It's really only in Hungary that we have an authoritarian government that has destroyed liberal democracy and dug in. Every other place, including North Macedonia, some years ago, citizens, opposition parties, everyone else has been able to get rid of that party, to eject it through elections. It's exhausting them and I just, like when I think about the Czechs, I just don't know if they can get up the energy to do it again, right? So that's a problem, you know, mobilising to defend liberal democratic institutions, because it's a life or death situation for them. Can you do it every four years? I don't know.

00:34:30 Tim Haughton

What I would definitely agree with Milada on, and very important, is I don't see that somehow Central and Eastern Europe is this kind of special case with a, you know, unique factors that mean that it faces the kind of challenges it does. Of course, every country has its own dynamics. Every region have their own dynamics, which which shape politics, but I think the underlying challenges of governability, delivery, of linkage, about those kinds of things, I see very strong parallels elsewhere across the globe. I actually think that Central and Eastern Europe is a region that the rest of the world can learn an awful lot from, by the way, and that's partly because it's not such a unique region.

00:35:17 Tim Haughton

In terms of the cures, I mean just a few things that I think I would emphasise. I mean one of the reasons why I think Milada and her co-authors' work is so important in this special issue, which you should all read, is because it shows how important citizen mobilisation can be. It can play an important role, not the only role, but a very important role in pushing back against these kind of pressures. So so first thing. Secondly, coalitions. You know, the only way that these sorts of politicians get defeated is is a willingness to to form coalitions, to essentially put aside some of your specific interests for the greater good. You know, one of the problems in a country like Slovakia is that this, you know, every politician thinks that the solution is: I should go off and form my own political party, right? So it's a real pathology, right? But actually what we see in the Polish case very well is the importance of of coalition willingness to put aside some of your interests for the greater good.

00:36:16 Tim Haughton

I would also certainly say, you know, political parties themselves, I think that they can be reformed and improved, and one of the messages that needs to come across is that, you know, my own study of political parties shows that the best political parties and the ones that really endure are the ones that actually put down significant roots, have significant organisational structures. They're not these kinds of parties or entities existing purely in in, in the cyber sphere. That actually when people have direct interaction with political parties and politicians, people who are listening to their concerns, not only does it mean that the politics of those parties then actually reflects those concerns, but also people feel that their voices are being heard and that I think is really crucial to to to try and foster an environment in which ordinary citizens feel that their voices actually matter. And if that's the case, then we can be much more optimistic about the future of democracy.

00:37:17 Licia Cianetti

Thank you. It's very nice to close on an optimistic note, which is rare these days. So we've come to the end of the podcast. I want to thank you both for joining the People Power Politics Podcast, and Milada for stopping to see us in Birmingham. I am Licia Cianetti, deputy director of CEDAR and the host of this People Power Politics Podcast episode. I have been talking to Milada Anna Vachudova, Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Tim Haughton, Professor of Comparative and European Politics and Deputy Director of CEDAR here at the University of Birmingham. Thank you both.

00:37:49 Outro Jingle

Thank you for listening to the People Power Politics Podcast, brought to you by CEDAR, the Center for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham. To learn more about our centre, and the exciting work we do on these issues around the world, please follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham and visit our website using the link in the podcast description.