How much of an autocrat do you need to be for the EU to notice? Enforcing compliance through informality

The new abstract reads as follows: "Several Member States of the European Union have seen autocratisation processes since 2010. The two prime cases of democratic backsliding were Poland (2015–2023) and Hungary (since 2010), but more episodic cases included Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia. The EU has struggled with how to respond to authoritarianism within. For years the finding of scholars was that the EU reacted generally too little and too late to change the trajectory of illiberally minded Member State governments. Instead, the EU focused on extending its ‘rule of law toolbox’, which has come to include tools for monitoring and coercion. Since 2021, this includes unprecedented fiscal instruments in the form of the Budget Conditionality Regulation. How does the EU use the tools in face of a new case of democratic backsliding? Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, after the elections in September 2023 in his fourth non-consecutive term, has quickly followed the ‘illiberal playbook’ of Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński and started undermining independent institutions such as anti-corruption prosecutors, investigators, and judges. How has the European Union reacted to these rule of law violations in another Member State? In this article we explore the reactions of the European Commission towards backsliding in Slovakia from September 2023. This timeframe allows us to see how the supranational body uses its acquired toolbox in a new case. Following a comprehensive search for documents in the EU institutions’ register, we show that the Commission has so far made little official use of the tools it has available. Yet much of the literature focuses on such official interactions, risking to miss large parts of the picture. What is happening in the black box of the Commission? We proceed to look at informal interactions, using (planned) interviews with policymakers in the Commission and Parliament as a source of information.