Anti-Democratic Trends Mean 65% of CEE Citizens Now Live in Electoral Autocracies: Report
In Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) the process of autocratization predominates, with three new autocratizers identified in 2025 – Croatia, Slovakia and Slovenia – according to an annual report compiled by researchers at the University of Gothenburg’s V-Dem Institute in Sweden..
This means 11 countries in CEE are now autocratizing, up from eight last year, which corresponds to 46 per cent of the region affecting 32 per cent of its population, said the report, “Democracy Report 2026: Unraveling the Democratic Era?”, published on Tuesday.
“The ‘third wave of autocratization’ now affects the EU, since it involves EU member states and its close neighbours. Among autocratizing EU members in Eastern Europe, we find Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, while neighbours include Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Serbia, and Ukraine,” it said.
Media censorship remains the most common tactic among autocratizing governments in the world, with 32 countries (73%) resorting to it.
The trend in CEE is part of a worldwide fall in democracy, which is back to 1978 levels for the average global citizen. The number of autocracies at the end of 2025 stood at 92 compared with 87 democracies, the report identified.
“74% of the world population (6 billion) now live in autocracies. Only 7% of the world population (0.6 billion) live in liberal democracies,” it said.
The dataset used by V-Dem, which stands for Varieties of Democracy, includes five core indices of democracy: electoral, liberal, egalitarian, participatory and deliberative. The Democracy Report mostly centres on the Liberal Democracy Index (LDI). It combines the above core institutions of electoral democracy with the liberal dimension: well-functioning checks and balances on the executive power by the legislature and the judiciary, and a strong rule of law ensuring that equal civil liberties are respected.
With 11 countries in CEE now autocratizing, just 29 per cent of people in the region enjoy democracy: 5 per cent live in the liberal democracies of Czechia and the Baltics, while 24 per cent reside in electoral democracies, such as Bulgaria or Poland. A large majority – 65 per cent – live in what V-Dem calls “electoral autocracies”, such as Hungary, Russia or Serbia. Belarus is the only closed autocracy, with 3 per cent of the population.
“Grey zone” regimes, which lie between electoral autocracies and electoral democracies, account for the remaining 3 per cent, residing in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova and North Macedonia.
In CEE, the report identified only two countries that are democratizing: Montenegro and Poland, making up 8 per cent of the region.
