'Practical wisdom' and EU integration

Turkish police fire tear gas on May day protesters, 2014. Demotix/ yenta kurtcebe. All rights reserved.In many potential or actual EU candidate states in south-eastern Europe, rulers with authoritarian tendencies are in power. They increasingly threaten the already weak pluralistic order, political freedoms, and civil liberties in their countries, even if they seem on the surface to comply with formal democratic rules.

Nikola Gruevski in Macedonia, Milo Djukanovic in Montenegro, Aleksandar Vucic in Serbia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, and Milorad Dodik in the Republika Srpska inside Bosnia are the most appropriate examples of this trend.

Labeled as democratically elected representatives, these leaders continue to undermine the foundations of substantial democracy. The conditions for fair elections are in most cases not met. Firstly, strong pressure is exerted on the media. It is manipulated in favour of the government parties. Secondly, supporting the government party is a necessary condition to obtaining a job in the public sector. Furthermore, to secure power, government parties distribute public resources as political patronage and follow clientelistic politics in the form of vote buying.