[yeron]

Wywiad z Profesor Kim Lane Scheppele na temat demokracji i autorytaryzmu.

As you can see, I don’t think that populism is the right label for what is going on. These ideological appeals that get analysts talking about populism are covers that distract the public from the consolidation of power through law. Autocrats are using their majorities in Parliament and the superficial appeal of legal change to remove all the constraints on the executive so that the executive can rule, unconstrained, for an unlimited period of time. The law part is really technical and so easy to hide from the lay-person. The distraction of populist appeals keeps people from figuring out what's really going on. But the relentless press to free the executive from legal constraint through law shows that autocracy is the real goal and populism is just the cover story.

I think the ideological appeals of the new autocrats are mostly distraction, rather than being something the leader believes in or the force that is really holding them in power. These populist appeals are dangerous by themselves, worthy of objection because they harm real people like the members of the opposition or desperate asylum seekers. But ultimately, populist appeals are a way of distracting the citizens from noticing the crashing of their constitutional governments going on underneath the surface.

Erdoğan got away with his court-packing plan, and then one year later, Victor Orbán did the same thing in Hungary. This was not just a coincidence. I've gone back and you can track that Orbán sent his foreign minister and his justice minister to Turkey; they had all these high-level meetings before Orbán copied Erdoğan. I think that they were trying to figure out how it was done. Again, when Orbán did it, it didn't look immediately like it was court-packing. It looked like Orbán was just defending human rights by expanding the jurisdiction of the Constitutional Court to hear hundreds and thousands of small-scale cases. The Constitutional Court, which is like the U.S. Supreme Court in that judges are appointed directly to that bench, was then packed with Orbán supporters, all in the name of increasing the enforcement of rights.

#polityka #anatomiapopulizmu #postkomunistycznepanstwomafijne #neuropa