Understanding democracy in Eastern Europe: a Lefortian analysis with a view from Latvia

The emergence of illiberal politics in Eastern Europe seems to have confirmed the worst expectations about the democratic stability in the region – the rise of right-wing nationalism and populism, accompanied by the attacks on liberal democratic rights and freedoms. This interpretation has also been criticized as reproducing the view of perpetually ‘immature’ Eastern Europe. In the spirit of this criticism, I offer an alternative framework for analysing democratization in the region, which draws on Claude Lefort’s accounts of the place of power and representation. Using the case of Latvia, I show how the image of ‘the people’ has been associated with a direct political action manifested by the masses and how it has clashed with political institutions as a self-representation of ‘the people’. The belief in an unmediated expression of popular sovereignty is illustrated with an exceptional use of direct democracy tools in Latvia – such as the referendum on the dissolution of the parliament in 2011. In Lefortian terms, the democratic self-representation in Latvia is continually challenged by a pre-democratic notion of the place of power as existing beyond the realm of political contestation. The existing perspectives have accounted Latvia as an example of the weakness of democratic culture in Eastern Europe, and as exhibiting mainstream populism, illustrated by the victory of the party ‘Who owns the state?’ in 2018 parliamentary elections. These accounts miss the particular conception of popular sovereignty in Latvia and its relationship with political representation, reducing it to an issue of strength of liberal democracy in Eastern Europe. This paper challenges dominant paradigms of democratic transition in Eastern Europe, including their interpretation on the causes of populism, and shows the value of alternative accounts of East European democratization.