20 November 2025
The European Democracy Shield and Its Whole-of-Society Approach
On 12 November, the European Commission published the long-awaited European Democracy Shield. While the EDS’s embrace of a bottom-up approach arguably marks a meaningful shift in how the Commission conceives democratic resilience, the initiative itself does little to translate this rhetoric into meaningful action. If Member State cooperation on tackling information manipulation and interference remains voluntary, civil society involvement largely consultative, and several flagship initiatives end up being merely symbolic, so will the EDS’s ambitious and inclusive language. Continue reading >>
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19 December 2023
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
This blogpost unpacks some of the ‘democratic paradoxes’ that come with the ‘Defence of Democracy’ package (DoD package), which the European Commission published on Tuesday, 12th of December. While a Recommendation on promoting civic engagement and citizen participation (Civil Society Recommendation) reflects positive changes in the Commission’s conception of democracy, the ‘Directive establishing harmonised requirements in the internal market on transparency of interest representation carried out on behalf of third countries’ (Foreign Funding Directive) directly contradicts this emphasis on a more citizen-centred model and is illustrative of a broader dilemma: how to defend democracy in the EU’s multi-level constitutional space, while keeping the sensitive legal tools for doing so out of the hands of the enemies of democracy that are already – and for the time being irreversibly – on its inside. Continue reading >>
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15 June 2023
Walking A Democratic Tightrope
That was fast. On 8 June, only 11 days after the Polish so-called ‘Lex Tusk’ was signed into force, the Commission launched an infringement procedure against Poland. For the first time, the Commission is relying on the principle of democracy in Art. 10 TEU as an autonomous plea, dropping another bombshell shortly after the first direct invocation of Art. 2 TEU in infringement proceedings against Hungary earlier this year. This contribution discusses both the perks and potential perils of the direct enforcement of the principle of democracy in Art. 10 TEU. On the one hand, a shift from what is arguably better called ‘militant rule of law’ towards more literally EU militant democracy is a positive development, as it better captures the nature and range of the principles which are de facto under threat in several EU Member States. On the other hand, the present infringement action illustrates the principled challenge of militant democracy to preserve the possibility of democratic regime change, all whilst not lapsing into a form of institutional conservatism. Continue reading >>
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