EU, are you blind? Rethinking democracy and accountability in the European Union

In the summer of 2020 thousands of Bulgarians took to the streets in Sofia and many cities across Europe, protesting against endemic corruption and demanding the resignation of the third Borisov government and the Chief Prosecutor Geshev. 'EU, are you blind?', 'EU, check how Bulgaria spends your money', 'EU, stop turning a blind eye' read some of the signs at the protests in Sofia, Brussels and Berlin. Unlike demonstrations against or in favour of European integration or policies, the Bulgarian protests revealed that domestic political crises can have an unexpected supranational dimension and by targeting both Bulgarian and European institutions, protestors expressed their lack of confidence in the executive and the judiciary and demanded oversight through European institutions. At odds with calls for a return to a Europe of nation states, the demands of the Bulgarian protestors challenge the conventional view in the literature that the Union has a serious legitimacy problem vis-à-vis European citizens. Although the concept of accountability has been central to the debates about democracy in the EU, its application is limited to assessing the accountability deficits of EU institutions. The aim of the article is to revisit the ongoing debate about democracy in the EU by exploring to what extent the EU can provide avenues for accountability and supplement accountability mechanisms at national level. Democratic regressions in EU member states have sparked an interest in EU democratic safeguards with a focus on judicial mechanisms and sanctions. Unlike the existing research which has a particular interest in the Union's attempts to reverse democratic decline in Hungary and Poland, the study adopts a broader comparative perspective with the aim to examine EU's toolbox and evaluate to what extent the Union has developed forms of accountability that match the multi-faceted nature of democratic erosion.