Art 7(2) TEU: European Council may determine existence of a serious and persistent breach by a Member State of Art 2 TEU value(s)
Additional Art 7-like option now: Commission may ask Court to confirm existence of manifest and particularly serious breaches of Art 2 TEU value(s) by a Member State
🇪🇺🏳️🌈⚖️🇭🇺 A legal earthquake - CJEU finds Hungary to have violated EU law on multiple counts with its anti-LGBT+ legislation (as expected) but also for the first time in history, in an EU law-reshaping precedent, finds Hungary to violate Art 2 TEU in a self-standing manner.
Everyone else: "...and the scenes from Budapest were remarkable and moving, as the spirit of 1956, of 1989, yea the veritable wind of change blew gently yet insistently on the dying embers of democracy..."
CJEU: "Yeah whatevs, sort it out goulash munchers or a fine's coming."
"...today’s pro-democracy governments discover booby traps laid by their predecessors and confront all kinds of veto players. But Poland’s experience has been instructive, highlighting the need for bold action and the right support from external actors."
This is the same Jarosław Kaczyński often to be found complaining about “foreign intervention” in Polish political processes and the nefarious influence exerted by the Russians?
Magyar on stage with a huge Hungarian flag
T-14 days until the Hungarian election. 🇭🇺🗳️
In this thread, I discuss Magyar's prospects of success in restoring (liberal) democracy (if he wins) and will tell you he's not the saviour you might think he is (but that he’s still good enough for now). 🧵 1/
New piece out at @electoralstudies.bsky.social w @ealasaid.bsky.social @havlikv.bsky.social @alenakluknavska.bsky.social
TLDR: incivility from populists marginally increases support for political violence among their followers
Data: 🇦🇷🇨🇿🇩🇪🇮🇹
Paper: tinyurl.com/2yhj43pm
Open data: osf.io/9m7zu
Viktor Orban wants Hungarians to re-elect him, even though he has turned Hungary into the most corrupt and one of the poorest countries in the EU. To do so, he is telling Hungarians to fear sabotage, thievery, or even a military attack from … Ukraine
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
💥Hungary’s Counter-Terrorism Center raided a Ukrainian state bank’s convoy not to enforce the law, but to manufacture a diplomatic crisis that could be weaponized in Orbán’s re-election campaign, sources familiar with the operation revealed to VSquare.
🎉 New publication 😍 The 4th wave of the #farright is marked by #mainstreaming & #normalisation - but how can we distinguish between them? In our new article, @gefjonoff.bsky.social and I map the existing literature, introduce a conceptual framework & outline research avenues. doi.org/10.1017/S147...
Wałęsa is many things, one of them being his refusal of using violence to change regime. Solidarność had a tiny minority of "let's kill communists" people, Leszke and his intelligentsia brothers in arms never got into that.
Outstanding piece. Contains well-evidenced key takeaways:
"Democratic survival ... is determined in large part by how obvious the threat to democracy is. The more people recognize that an elected leader is trying to destroy democracy from within, the less likely it is that said leader will succeed"
Just 3% of Republican students feel they don’t belong on campus because of their political views. THREE!
The far right are using a lie to destroy US higher education and X-indoctrinated reactionary centrists are actively helping them.
Just yesterday Krastev gave an interview in Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland, saying "We must involve far-right parties in the new European consensus. We cannot constantly tremble with fear of them and do nothing else." He gets a platform & suggests they are just another political actor to be house-trained.
I'm kind of sick and tired of seeing privileged (mostly male) senior scholars take advantage of their own privileged positions to mainstream and normalise the far right, seemingly without any shame (or consequences).
Your work is harming us all (collectively, societally, and within the discipline).
Celebrating the 100th post in the Future of Populism series 🔮 with a brilliantly written blog by @mattiazulianello.bsky.social 🌳🌲! His PopulisTree brings clarity to decades of research on populism. 🎉 Read the post 👇
theloop.ecpr.eu/making-sense... 🌀
Published recently in @polstudies.bsky.social... on how Scotland can offer broader lessons on polarization and the failure/success of populist radical right parties 👇
Fascinating that after so many unmitigated disasters that this guy's advice has been it took Epstein files and a relatively middle of the road error of judgement to take him down.
Great intervention by @jwmueller-pu.bsky.social on reactionary centrism, anti-wokeness, and the tendency to interpret the success of the right as backlash instead of as its own political project
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
🇺🇸🇭🇺🇵🇱 US rule of law crisis is a calque of the Hungary/Poland crisis, episode 546.
The radical right’s master frame remains ethnic nationalism. Remigration is simply one of its logical consequences. First came stopping (or minimizing) immigration; next is pushing people with migrant backgrounds to leave. Expect further radicalization.
Who protests against democratic backsliding? A new working paper with Margalit, Sheffer and Yakir examines this issue and finds that people’s conceptions of what democracy means play a crucial role in predicting whether they engage in active opposition to backsliding efforts. osf.io/preprints/so...
Cas Mudde spells out what has become largely the consensus among researchers: moving right on immigration will not weaken the far right nor strengthen social democracy. If your reaction is "but in Denmark" please at least familiarize yourself with Danish politics
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Also: the media, which made this election all about the AfD. Yes, they have tripled their support,which is impressive. But that still leaves them in 3rd place, and 10 points below their national polling, something that hardly features in the coverage
