Aspiring authoritarians share some common tactics for trying to dismantle a democracy. But recent cases also reveal lessons on how to defend against these attacks and slow the threat of democratic backsliding.
September 2025
Open rejections of democracy are now rare, yet democratic backsliding is a fact. This suggests both that threats to democracy are ambiguous, and that defenders of democracy (who must struggle to see clearly despite this ambiguity) have been too slow in responding to them. Since an ounce of prevention is still worth a pound of cure, being able to distinguish early between democratic and undemocratic politicians is key, even as all of them claim to be democrats.
How can defenders of democracy make a surer assessment of whether someone is a fake democrat, while also making it easier for citizens to carry out the same process of discernment?
While every case of democratic backsliding is different, there does seem to be a common “authoritarian playbook” on which aspiring authoritarians draw as they seek to change the political systems in their respective countries.
“[Hungarian prime minister and Fidesz party leader] Viktor Orbán gave us an example of how we can win,” said leader Jarosław Kaczyński of the Polish Law and Justice party (PiS) four years before it came to power. “The day will come when we will succeed, and we will have Budapest in Warsaw.” Meetings and intense exchanges followed, as Łukasz Jasina, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson in the last PiS government, confirmed to me in an interview. More recently, the former deputy foreign minister from PiS admitted in a radio broadcast that Israel consulted with Poland about overhauling the Israeli judicial system in 2023.
Building on similar previous work and basing my claims on two-dozen interviews that I conducted with political and civil society figures in Hungary, Poland, and Israel, I argue that spreading information about the authoritarian playbook has been crucial to defending at least one threatened pillar of constitutional democracy: judicial independence.
This is significant not only because an independent judiciary matters in itself, but also because it is typically among the authoritarian playbook’s first targets. Capturing the courts opens the way to other attacks on democratic norms and principles. Fighting the capture can be challenging, moreover, because it may advance by means of seemingly minor and technical changes such as altering the manner in which judges are chosen. As many of my interviewees acknowledged, in both Hungary and Poland the courts were inefficient and retained judges formed under communism. These facts increased judicial vulnerability to Fidesz and PiS takeovers dressed up as reforms.
The earlier citizens can be warned of the illiberal agenda hiding under the innocuous “reform” label, the better. My interviewees said that media reports followed by person-to-person contacts proved key in diffusing information about the authoritarian playbook.
Orbán’s Hungary stood as the cautionary tale. In Poland and later Israel, defenders of democracy could tell something was amiss simply by observing the open meetings that members of their respective governments had with their counterparts from Budapest to learn what Fidesz had done to secure an unhealthy degree of ruling-party control over the Hungarian courts.
With the threat thus recognized and named, mobilizing opposition in Poland and Israel proved easier than otherwise would most likely have been the case.
Democratic resistance is a long battle that must be fought through many stages and in many arenas. There are no “silver bullets.” Success may at times have to be measured in terms of delays or limits imposed on backsliding, splits created in the ruling coalition, or higher reputational and other costs forced on authoritarian incumbents who insist on bulling ahead with antidemocratic plans. In these senses, Polish and Israeli prodemocracy forces succeeded. They slowed the progress of authoritarian measures by rendering them highly controversial, and in Poland the protests in defense of judicial independence laid the basis for the successful electoral mobilization of 2023.
Hungary: “A Pilot Project”
My Hungarian interview subjects — opposition politicians and representatives of prominent civil society groups — mostly said that they had quickly grown suspicious of Fidesz’s “reforms,” but had not grasped the full depth and scale of its attacks on democracy. “We were surprised at every stage of democratic backsliding,” as Miklós Ligeti from Transparency International told me. In 2010, recalled opposition politician Klára Dobrev, some had naïvely welcomed Fidesz’s winning of a supermajority because they thought this would give the voters a clear governing party to evaluate at the next election.
This naivety might be excusable, however. As Dobrev reminded me, Hungary in 2010 was a “pilot project” and not yet a malign example. Orbán enjoyed the element of surprise and ran what Yaniv Roznai calls “Hungarian Blitz,” using the Fidesz supermajority to alter the procedure for naming Constitutional Court judges, raising their number from eleven to fifteen, and cutting back sharply on their ability to review government actions. Next, he went after the lower courts, reducing the compulsory retirement age and creating a new National Judicial Office to screen candidates for the bench.
The opposition and some experts (including retired judges) went into an uproar, but there was no wide popular pushback. Major antigovernment protests would not start until 2014 in Hungary, and they concerned other issues.
Poland: “Budapest in Warsaw”
When PiS won both the parliamentary and presidential elections in 2015, it lacked a supermajority but moved aggressively anyway. The new government tried to pack the Constitutional Tribunal while compelling it to deal with so many laws about itself that it had little time to curb arbitrary exercises of power in other areas.
Unlike their Hungarian counterparts five years prior, Polish oppositionists quickly grasped what was going on. People from civil society and the opposition parties told me that observing Hungary had prepared them for the PiS judicial “reforms.” Indeed, Hungarians had briefed Poles about what to expect — a big help to the latter in getting their mobilization going.
From the outset, the Committee for the Defence of Democracy (KOD) played a pivotal role in pushing back. It was founded a month after the October 2015 parliamentary election, and through June 2016 held rallies nationwide that drew tens of thousands. Its former deputy head, Kinga Łozińska, told me that they “talked about Hungary quite often” and that “our mobilization feeling was based on Hungary.” According to Krzysztof Izdebski from the George Soros–funded Stefan Batory Foundation, the Hungarian example was very helpful to “convince people that the subversion of democracy is not just our imagination and that it can happen here.”
The protests supported the judges’ rulings against the PiS government’s attempts to lock in political control of the Tribunal. In December 2016, however, the term of the Constitutional Tribunal’s president expired and he was replaced by a PiS nominee, giving the government effective control of the Tribunal. Thus the demonstrations failed in their proximate aim, though in retrospect we can see that they laid the groundwork for later protests that would prove more successful.
As in Hungary, the ordinary judiciary were next in government sights. In mid-2017 came laws to: 1) control new appointments to the National Judicial Council, which names judges; 2) dismiss all sitting Supreme Court justices; and 3) enable the removal of all sitting lower-court presidents while reducing the retirement age for all lower-court judges.
Parliament’s passage of these laws triggered massive countrywide demonstrations that lasted more than a week, and in which the Hungarian “reform” experience featured prominently. Jakub Kocjan of Democratic Action and Piotr Kołomycki, who ran communications for Civic Platform (the main rival party to PiS), both told me that Kaczyński’s promise to create “Budapest in Warsaw” was highlighted in their mobilization efforts. His close links to Orbán gave credibility to the opposition’s warnings that Poland would “end up like Hungary.” Kocjan called this narrative “super important” in making citizens aware of the threat that PiS’s judicial takeover posed to the country’s democratic character.
Pressured by the protests, President Andrzej Duda vetoed the first two laws despite his closeness to Kaczyński. Duda eventually presented his own “reform” proposals, which parliament adopted in December 2017. They featured weaker versions of the most controversial initial PiS proposals.
In sum, when attacks on the judiciary started, Polish prodemocracy forces — schooled by Hungary’s experience — quickly mounted protests. Orbán’s running of the authoritarian playbook allowed his neighbors to name plausible threats to constitutional democracy that alarmed Polish society. PiS enjoyed no element of surprise and could not surf, as Fidesz had, on a wave of public ignorance about what was afoot. Polish defenders of democracy managed to raise the costs of autocratization and slow it down. And perhaps no less important, according to my Polish interlocutors the protests against judicial “reform” strongly contributed to the emergence of the popular mobilization that paved the way for the change at the ballot box in 2023, when voters took away PiS’s parliamentary majority.
To be sure, my interviewees also told me that statements by judges, experts, and prominent international voices against the “reform” proposals helped to sound the alarm as well. Poland has a vibrant civil society that was able to mobilize effectively, but Hungary’s civil society at the onset of democratic backsliding was similarly competent. Therefore, the diffusion of information about Hungary (the authoritarian playbook) to Polish citizens and the highlighting of Kaczyński’s vow to emulate Orbán were more important than the current literature acknowledges. A similar argument can be made about Israel.
Israel: “This Is Not Poland”
In January 2023, Israeli justice minister Yariv Levin introduced a judicial “reform” that included proposals to limit the Supreme Court’s review authority; allow parliament to “reenact” statutes that the Court had struck down; ban the Court from reviewing Basic Laws (Israel’s version of a constitution) or ruling on the “reasonableness” of government decisions; and change the makeup of the judicial-selection body.
As in Poland years earlier, reaction was swift. Within days, organized resistance had formed. Saturday-evening street protests in Tel Aviv soon spread to dozens of other cities. They would turn out to be the longest and the largest protests in Israel’s history.
Eran Schwartz, an operational coordinator of the protests, told me that the frame of reference was local at first, but that “after a month or two” what had happened in Hungary and Poland came in for a closer look. Going beyond what could be learned from the media, Israeli protest leaders invited representatives from Hungarian and Polish civil society to share their experiences and inform Israeli colleagues what to expect. Jakub Kocjan was among those who visited Israel in person.
The Israeli protest movement then began using the negative examples of Hungary and Poland to raise awareness and mobilize citizens. According to Uri Zaki, an official of the opposition party Democrats and former civil activist, these negative examples were constantly highlighted and served as “scarecrows” to help with the mobilization. To this end, as Schwartz told me, short videos about what had happened in Poland and Hungary were spread via social media to educate and alarm the public. The clips drew millions of views, and demonstrators began chanting “Yariv Levin, poh zeh lo Polin” (“this is not Poland”). Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was similarly reminded that Israel was not Hungary.
Once again, knowledge of the authoritarian playbook as run elsewhere was helpful to national defenders of judicial independence. The bland rhetoric of “reform” was not allowed to camouflage what the government was intending. Reports of how the Israeli government had consulted with Polish counterparts raised alarms as well. As the protests’ duration, scale, and intensity all show, the public mobilized strongly. The government suspended its “reform” in March, and when parliament enacted a ban on “reasonableness” review, the Supreme Court struck down the new law.
The timely spread of information about the Hungarian and Polish cases made it easier to rouse the public. As in the Polish case other factors were at work too (not least among them prior undemocratic actions by Netanyahu and his allies), but spreading word about the playbook had a significance that must not be overlooked.
Lessons for Other Democracies
In established democracies, warnings about threats to democratic pillars may fail to resonate. These democracies have been robust over many decades, so most voters cannot fathom that they could die.
Could it be that countries with recent memories of authoritarian rule are more alive to the threat of backsliding? That seems to have been the case in Brazil and South Korea. Yet Hungary and Poland have such memories, and that did not stop democratic backsliding.
What seems to have been more essential than memories of authoritarian times was the ability of prodemocracy actors to establish a clear link between known authoritarian practices and an incumbent. President Yoon Suk Yeol’s December 2024 declaration of martial law reminded Koreans of a similar practice from the era of military rule that ended in 1987, while Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s praise for the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s left many Brazilians with few doubts about his intentions.
Hence, the communist past was not essential for the struggle of Polish and Hungarian prodemocracy actors because, after all, Fidesz and PiS portrayed their judicial “reforms” as a fight against the communist heritage. For democratic resistance in Poland, it was pivotal that prodemocracy forces established a clear link between PiS’s “reforms” and similar undemocratic practices in Hungary. This helped to lay bare the incumbents’ real intentions. In Israel, with no authoritarian past, the same dynamic applied.
Here are the key lessons for democracy defenders: 1) If an incumbent emulates a policy from the authoritarian playbook previously implemented by another autocrat, use that concrete example against the incumbent. When you are trying to warn the general public about threats to democracy, real examples beat abstract messaging. 2) Be resourceful, be clear, and leverage technology as much as you can. You may not reverse the backsliding trend, but you can slow it and give opposition more time to regroup and raise the costs of authoritarian reversion.
The authoritarian playbook is the autocrats’ script. They run it because it has worked. They need to follow it to be successful, and it can become their weakness if democracy’s defenders learn to use it properly.
Filip Milačić is senior researcher at the “Democracy of the Future” office of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, visiting professor at the Central European University (CEU), and research affiliate at the CEU’s Democracy Institute. He is the author of Stateness and Democratic Consolidation: Lessons from Former Yugoslavia (2022).
Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy
Featured image credit: Janos Kummer/Getty Images
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