Authors

Discussion

While democratic backsliding and populism had taken European democracies by the storm, some societies proved to be less resilient than others. For the young Eastern European democracies, the emphasis on modernization and narrowing of the economic gap with the West rather on development of political institutions, left their political systems vulnerable to the threats of democratic backsliding. However, the region is not homogenous. While the region is considered to have relatively weak civil society organizations, the comparative example of the post-crisis Lithuania and Hungary show the divergent paths. While the former has kept itself within the mainstream neoliberal economic system under the pressure of populism, the latter has reverted to the system of authoritarian capitalism (increased spheres of interests by the elites, verticality of power, reconfiguring the boundaries between public and private, violating the rule of law). The contribution of this paper is to introduce the role of civil society into the discussion on the variety of capitalism in the region. The expectations are the civil society plays the role of a roadblock or a countermovement in the state-society relations, preventing the illegitimate (vested) interests from corrupting democracy. The expected results are that the interaction of the state with private interest groups is structured similarly to the varieties of capitalism in those countries.