News from the AUTHLIB Consortium
December 2025
Dear Colleagues and Friends,
As 2025 draws to a close, the AUTHLIB (Neo-authoritarianisms in Europe and the Liberal Democratic Response) project closes an eventful quarter before it enters its final stretch early next year. Our December newsletter highlights key developments from across the consortium, including preparations for the project’s concluding conference in January 2026, recent practitioner and youth forums, public events and webinars, new and forthcoming academic publications, ongoing survey analyses, data-sharing efforts, and the upcoming release of country reports synthesizing insights on illiberalism across Europe.
For a snapshot of our work over October–December 2025, check our highlights below!
We wish you happy holidays and all the very best for 2026!
Upcoming Event
Mapping the Illiberal Challenge: Patterns, Drivers, and Consequences
AUTHLIB Final Conference
Thursday-Friday, January 8-9, 2026
Central European University, Budapest
In-person event
As Europe confronts the rise of illiberalism across the continent and graples with its political and societal consequences, the Horizon-funded Neo-authoritarianism in European and the Liberal Democratic Response (AUTHLIB) project brings together leading scholars to unpack what drives this shift and how democracies can respond.
Over two days, speakers will explore—among many other themes—the historical roots of illiberalism, the appeal of illiberal narratives and voters’ receptiveness today, the strategies of far-right actors, the social and economic anxieties they tap into, and the evolving challenges to constitutionalism, pluralism, and the rule of law. Drawing on cutting-edge research—from large-scale surveys and social-media analyses to deliberative forums—the conference will present the project’s final academic insights exploring the challenges liberal democracies face in the 21st century.
Register to join in person
AUTHLIB Interactive Dashboard
Our data is now available for you!
Liberalism faces a variety of ideological challenges. Actors such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy have transformed Europe’s political landscape by presenting illiberal alternatives. Understanding these alternatives requires a map multiple, overlapping ideological dimensions, from religious or conservative values to nationalism, populism, and anti-pluralism.
The AUTHLIB Interactive Dashboard provides such a multidimensional map. It combines datasets produced by multiple members of the AUTHLIB consortium, allowing researchers, journalists, and citizens to explore how authoritarianism, populism, and illiberalism manifest across seven European countries: Austria, Czechia, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom. The data are presented in an approachable visual format, while the interactive nature of the platform allows users to generate and export their own figures, which can be saved as image files.
Read a short explainer by Dean Gibson Schafer (Mississipi State University) and Bálint Mikola (CEU Democracy Institute) and see what the dashboard has for you!
Read more
Past Events
Recordings of AUTHLIB’s public events are available on AUTHLIB’s YouTube channel.
Democracy Under Pressure: How Illiberal Politics Reshape Europe
AUTHLIB Webinar
Illiberal parties and movements across Europe have become a defining challenge to liberal democracy. They reshape democratic institutions and redefine public policies while their ideas impact mainstream discourse, eroding the boundaries between democratic pluralism and authoritarian tendencies. Illiberalism’s impact is increasingly substantive, transforming political cultures, institutions, and policy outcomes across the continent.
This event, which introduced a special issue of Politics and Governance on Illiberal Politics in Europe (edited by the AUTHLIB consortium), discussed the ideological, policy, and institutional dimensions of illiberal politics in Europe. Drawing on examples from a variety of case studies, the conversation identified broader patterns, trends, and comparative insights across Europe. Panelists examined how illiberalism reshapes political discourse and democratic practice, and they reflected on what these developments mean for the resilience of liberal democracy in Europe and beyond.
Speakers:
– Petra Guasti, Associate Professor of Democratic Theory, Charles University
– Marlene Laruelle, Director, Illiberalism Studies Program, The George Washington University
– Bálint Mikola, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, CEU Democracy Institute
Chair:
– Zsuzsanna Végh, Program Officer, German Marshall Fund of the United States
Watch the video
Bohemia Illiberalis? Perspectives on Czechia’s Future After the Elections
AUTHLIB Webinar
Czechia held parliamentary elections on October 3–4. There was a high likelihood that they would lead to the return of former prime minister Andrej Babiš and his populist ANO party to power in a coalition with radical-right or radical-left forces. Such an outcome could profoundly affect not only the democratic quality of Czech politics, but also the country’s stance on key questions of foreign and security policy, ranging from defense spending to support for Ukraine. Czechia’s partners should therefore prepare not only for the presence of a second government from the ranks of the radical-right Patriot group (after Hungary’s) in the EU Council, but also for heightened volatility and growing Euroscepticism in Czech foreign policy.
This panel discussion, convened in the immediate aftermath of the elections and in light of the first official results, examined the potential implications of a Babiš comeback and different coalition scenarios. It explored their impact on Czech foreign and security policy, the country’s approach toward Ukraine and Russia, and the broader state of democratic checks and balances, media freedom, and civil society there.
Speakers:
– Vít Dostál, Executive Director, AMO
– Petra Guasti, Associate Professor, Charles University Prague
– Andrea Michalcová, Director, Centre for an Informed Society
Chair:
– Daniel Hegedüs, Regional Director, German Marshall Fund of the United States
Watch the video
Publications
From ‘Wokeism’ to ‘Le Wokeisme’: Diffusion of Anti-Wokeness as a Far-Right Master Frame From the United States to France
Journal Article
AUTHLIB researchers Batuhan Eren and Manuela Caiani (Scuola Normale Superiore) published an article titled “From ‘Wokeism’ to ‘Le Wokeisme’: Diffusion of Anti-Wokeness as a Far-Right Master Frame From the United States to France” in the Nations and Nationalism journal.
ABSTRACT
The transnationalization of the far right is a noteworthy and evolving phenomenon, characterized by extensive networks of actors, their collaborative activities and the exchange of novel ideas and frames. The emergence and cross-national spread of ‘anti-wokeness’ is a recent trend in the ongoing transnationalization process. As a concept to criticize the woke ideas while promoting the illiberal and conservative ones, anti-wokeness emerged in the United States during the 2010s, yet it has also been rapidly adopted by the political, social and intellectual actors in many European countries—among which France represents a paradigmatic case. This research note, which is a pilot study under a broader research project, investigates this cross-national spread of anti-wokeness and addresses the questions of why and how anti-wokeness as a popular frame of far-right politics has diffused from the United States to France recently. Drawing on the analysis of social media content and in-depth interviews with far-right/conservative figures, we propose an analytical framework that frames the spread of anti-wokeness as a phenomenon of the transnationalization of the far right through the cross-national diffusion of a master frame.
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The 2024 Chapel Hill Expert Survey on political party positioning in Europe: Twenty-five years of party positional data
Journal Article
AUTHLIB researcher Jan Rovny (Sciences Po) together with colleagues published an article titled “The 2024 Chapel Hill Expert Survey on political party positioning in Europe: Twenty-five years of party positional data” in the Electoral Studies journal.
ABSTRACT
This research note introduces the 2024 Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) on party positioning in Europe. When combined with earlier waves of CHES data, this new data set provides estimates of the ideological and policy positions of political parties over twenty-five years of European politics, 1999–2024. The note demonstrates the value of the time series by examining two important trends in European politics: potential changes in the economic left-right positioning of radical right parties, and the emergence of a transnational cleavage composed of European integration and immigration. The note further explores two new items in the 2024 survey designed to measure horizontal accountability: party positioning on executive constraints and judicial independence. This illustrates the value of CHES EU data on party positioning both over time and through innovations in the seventh and most recent survey.
Read more
Varieties of Illiberalism: An Overview of Policy and Ideological Differences Among Illiberal Parties in Europe
AUTHLIB Working Paper
In this paper, Lauritz Autischer, Beatrice Bottura (both Central European University), and Bálint Mikola (CEU Democracy Institute) explore the relationship between the ideological stance of illiberal parties in Europe and their policy positions on a range of policy areas including economic policy, immigration policy, education and cultural policy, social policy, foreign policy, and gender. To achieve this goal, the paper relies on expert survey evaluations from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES 2024) and the Populism and Political Parties (POPPA 2023) expert survey. The paper uses Enyedi’s (2024) conceptualization of illiberalism that understands it as a political ideology based on power concentration, a partisan state, and closed society. The authors operationalize each of these dimensions using proxy variables from the expert surveys and explore their relationship with policy positions in search of clusters of illiberal parties that embody different varieties of illiberalism. Relying on a sample of 41 illiberal parties in Europe, they identify four varieties of illiberal parties that show a large degree of coherence across the policy areas we examine: religious xenophobes, authoritarian traditionalists, national conservatives, and leftist illiberals. Beyond establishing an initial typology of illiberal parties based on their policy profiles, the paper also makes a methodological contribution by demonstrating the applicability of expert survey data to gauge parties’ policy positions across various dimensions.
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The Blueprint to Kill the EU: Complacency About the Trump-Threat to Europe Would Be Fatal
AUTHLIB Blog
Europe is torn between shock, indignation, and a surprising complacency in its reaction to the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, writes Daniel Hegedus (The German Marshall Fund of the United States). Instead, it should prepare to counter the threats the new US strategy may pose to the European Union.
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The Links Between Bulgaria’s Revival Party and United Russia Merit Scrutiny
AUTHLIB Blog
How does the rise of the far-right party, institutional paralysis, and state capture threaten Bulgaria’s democratic path? In his latest post for AUTHLIB, Dimitar Keranov (The German Marshall Fund of the United States) explains the dangers the growing links between Bulgaria’s Revival party and United Russia hold.
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The project “AUTHLIB – Neo-Authoritarianisms in Europe and the Liberal Democratic Response” is funded by the European Union and the UK Research and Innovation. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or UK Research and Innovation. Neither the European Union nor the UK Research and Innovation can be held responsible for them.
