Garvan Walshe is a former National and International Security Policy Adviser to the Conservative Party
Democracy doesn’t defend itself. It only survives if citizens and the politicians they elect defend political institutions and keep those who would destroy them out of power.
This is the idea behind militant democracy, whose name we owe to the anti-Nazi German lawyer, Karl Lowenstein – who damned the consequences of its absence back in 1937. A full fascist dictatorship was only the most developed form of the corruption of representative institutions in the countries that had only begun to develop them after the First World War.
But if the fascism of the 1930s was an ideological end in itself, today’s authoritarian leaders exploit whatever ideology they find convenient to degrade democratic institutions in the service of one of the oldest use of political power – theft.
The pattern is an obvious one: a charismatic leader wins support from voters alarmed at the pace of change, uses it to dismantle independent media, intimidate the judiciary, quashes investigations into his and his friends’ corruption. The Czech version of this figure is Andre Babis, Prime Minister between 2017 and 2021 and the candidate defeated at last weekend’s presidential election.
This state capture is always a risk in relatively new democracies, but the post-communist ones in Central Europe are especially vulnerable. Their previous political culture made no distinction between state institutions and the government of the day, and the collapse of communism produced an especially wrenching economic transformation that left the relatively elderly, relatively rural and relatively uneducated parts of the population to make do with a disproportionately small share of the benefits from the transition to the free market.
As in the West, these “left behind” voters were willing to give populists a chance, but with crucial differences. Unlike in the West, where the populism usually takes a nationalist cast (left-wing populism exists, but those who vote for it, in Greece and Spain are, as much as for Corbyn’s Labour, a different social group), there’s no fixed ideological pattern.
If Hungary’s populism styles itself as national conservative, Romania’s is that of the successor party of the Communists, and Babis’s Czech party joined the same European grouping as the Liberal Democrats and Emmanuel Macron.
The transitions from communism left Eastern European countries with much weaker protection from wayward electoral majorities than the transitions from right-wing dictatorship did in Italy, Spain and Portugal.
Hungary’s constitution could be changed with a two-thirds majority in a single house of parliament – something easy to obtain under its majoritarian electoral system.
Poland’s judges are appointed by its parliament, rather than by an indirect committee in which political forces only play one role among many (as in Spain). State influence over government companies, universities and arts institutions wasn’t removed after the transition from communism, so allowing a government determined to take control plenty of opportunities.
Furthermore, voters that didn’t grow up under democracy often take a consumer view of politics. They ask: what can this politician give me? – rather than think about the common good or the value of democratic institutions. While this view is hardly unknown elsewhere, it’s particularly strong in post-Communist countries. The social attitudes of Germans show this particularly well: those of people who grew up in the GDR are very different from their Western compatriots, but younger Germans’ attitudes no longer feature an East-West divide.
Finally, there is in many former Eastern bloc countries some nostalgia for the old system that transactional populists like Babis have been able to exploit with the help of equally transactional Russian money (Moscow offered a nuclear power station to the Czechs). Russia’s tactic is to create relationships of economic dependence, and use them as a tool of control (such as when Gazprom cut off supplies to Bulgaria last April). It has been emulated by China, which has sought to bully Lithuania as well as Czechia (as the Czech Republic was renamed) for supporting embattled fellow-democrats in Taiwan.
General Pavel, who defeated Babis, campaigned against this model of domestic corruption and foreign dependence on Russia. He was helped by the pro-Russian views of the outgoing (and barely alive) Milos Zeman, and Babis’s crass campaign, which insinuated that Pavel would start a war against Putin.
As befits a former head of NATO’s military committe, Pavel’s campaign featured strong support for the Western alliance and Ukraine’s fight for freedom. But Pavel’s core message was of public virtue. He had been a servant of the state in the Armed Forces, and would serve as a president above politics – which is how the Czech constitution envisaged the role, originally filled by Vaclav Havel, after 1989.
For abroad (foreign policy is one of the areas in which the Czech president has significant influence) he indicated his determination not only to support Ukraine’s NATO membership, but also by immediately calling president Tsai-Ing Wen of Taiwan, much to transactional Beijing’s irritation.
Pavel is also the latest in a series of figures, including Klaus Iohannis in Romania and Suzana Caputova in Slovakia who have made public integrity and full membership in the Western alliance into a new type of civic nationalism in which their citizens can take pride.
This might perhaps explain why their militant democracy reaches beyond the thinly cosmopolitan campaigning that proved so ineffective in neighbouring Hungary: it gives them a country they can be proud of.