Following the expansion of EU over the last seventy years, this infographic depicts the evolution, and relative decline, of Europe’s post-war liberal democratic rule. Back in the 1950s, and for three decades thereafter, all member states had solid liberal democratic governments. The Union was in fact meant to be an exclusive club of liberal democracies. But things did not turn exactly that way. Already by the 1980s, populism, an amalgam of democracy and illiberalism (hence, minimally defined as democratic illiberalism), won power in Greece and then flourished elsewhere, particularly in the southern and eastern parts of the continent. During and after the 1990s, nativist parties—those standing in opposition to migration, further European integration, and globalization—grew strong in most developed countries in western and northern Europe. Meanwhile in Eastern Europe—because of national and ethnic divisions, persisting state corruption, or both—most countries have failed to this date to produce solid and durable liberal democratic governments; instead, as shown by the four CEE countries included herein, most governments in this region stand today as exemplars of democratic illiberalism.
