democracy

The sequence of events in Poland might sound familiar to many of you. Hungary experienced quite a similar scenario. Clearly, Poland is not an isolated case. Political radicalisation and anti-democratic backtracking might be contagious.

The mass scale of the social response to what Law and Justice is doing, the Committee for the Defence of Democracy, which within two days gathered over 30,000 supporters may be just a preview of a massive political force that shall defend the rule of law, its sense of belonging to Europe and liberal democracy which it deems indispensable, or even \'holy\'.

On Wednesday, December 2, 2015, Svetilnik hosted a roundtable discussion on \'The Current State of Democracy in Slovenia\', the discussants being Milan Brglez, PhD the President of the National Assembly and Matej Tonin, MA, an opposition member of parliament.

Freedom Games 2015 took place in Lodz on October 15-17. For the two and a half day exhibiting 43 different events, over one hundred panelists and active participants together with almost half a thousand attendees gathered in the industrial space of the former power plant turned into an amazing EC1 – City of Culture building complex to discuss “How to Save Democracy?”.

The story of Singapore does not match the usual idea of combining democracy and the market economy. While in the developed countries of the West, democracy has been threatening the functioning of the market economy, Singapore and its authoritarian regime has maintained the status of the easiest country to do business in.

Much has been written on the reasons for the rise and fall or right-wing populist parties in Western Europe, as the French Front National (FN) or the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). However, most of these commentaries are not based on empirical research. The presented overview highlights the seven factors which comparative research defines as decisive for the electoral fortunes of right-wing populist parties in Western Europe.

Following the elections in spring 2010, the Orbán government began dismantling the institutions underlying the democratic rule of law and the system of checks and balances, discrediting and ignoring fundamental rights.

On April 24, 2015, Hungarian Europe Democracy (HED) convened a workshop about “Illiberal democracies, what can the European Union do in case a member state regularly and systematically breaches European values and regulations?”.

Recent developments in Hungary and Romania have prompted a question that once would have been considered fanciful at best: could there be a dictatorship inside the European Union?

The 25th anniversary of the Polish Round Table [that started the democratic transition] inspires to look back and reflect on what really happened in the spring of 1989. Perhaps this anniversary does not have to be only a thing of the past and a series of throwback celebrations?