Democratic Front-Sliding in the European Union: Political, Legal, and Normative Paths Forward

After a decade of global democratic recession, there are glimmers of hope, also within the European Union, a notable example of "democratic backsliding." With Hungary's Fidesz government increasingly marginalized and Poland's PiS government ousted in the 2023 election, scholars and policymakers now tasked to explore the EU's potential role in "democratic front-sliding," the restoration of liberal democratic norms after autocratization (Ginsburg & Huq 2022). In this paper, we answer this call, probing the political, legal, and normative challenges and opportunities that democratic front-sliding opens for the EU. In so doing, we build upon existing accounts tackling the EU’s initial inactions and subsequent interventions to enforce the rule of law and sanction backsliding member states (Emmons & Pavone 2021; Pech 2022; Kelemen 2023; Scheppele 2023), but we also expand our focus to what the EU can and should do to support the restoration of democracy. Focusing narrowly on the rule of law – a necessary but insufficient component of democracy – and probing the EU sanctions does not help us answer how the EU can and should support the broader restoration of liberal democracy itself. To this end, our argument proceeds in three parts. First, we identify the political pressure points in democratic backsliding regimes that could become the focus of EU-backed democratic front-sliding campaigns. We identify the political strategies that civil society, pro-democracy elites, and the EU can adopt to resist the institutional remnants of democratic backsliding while jump-starting democratization. Second, we analyze how Articles 2 and 10 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) can be mobilized by different European institutions to support democratic front-sliding. Finally, we draw on democratic theory to tackle the normative challenge of whether the EU has the requisite democratic credentials to enforce democracy within its member states, exploring polyvalent concepts such as constitutional diversity.