Civil Society and Electoral Change in Central and Eastern Europe

The German Marshall Fund (GMF) has published a book charting the recent post-Communist transitions in Slovakia, Croatia, Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine, using case studies and comparative analyses to illustrate the central role played by civil society.

The editors, Joerg Forbrig and Pavol Demes of GMF’s Bratislava office, write that the democratic changes that have swept through central and eastern Europe in recent years have been remarkable.

In the above-mentioned countries, post-Communist politics had increasingly departed from the democratic reforms initiated after 1989. Instead, semi-authoritarian regimes had emerged that openly manipulated democratic processes and abused the human, civic and political rights of their citizens, the authors say. 

Yet on the occasion of national elections, the authors continue, neo-autocrats found themselves challenged by democratic alliances of opposition parties, civil-society groups and citizens at large. These movements asserted a democratic choice over the future of their countries and, by way of peaceful mobilisation, returned democratically elected governments to office, according to the authors.

Václav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic, writes in the preface to the book that although post-Communism, with its exaggerated emphasis on the power of the economy, politics, law enforcement, justice and the media, in ways echoed the Communist period, “the ethos of the anti-communist revolutions of 1989 and 1990, the natural self-organization of civil society and the international context made a return to totalitarianism impossible”.