The rise of far-right and illiberal democracy in the Europeanunion: Comparative cases of Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia

The thesis deals with assessing the states of democracy in Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, and it is aimed to offer a more detailed assessment and analysis of defective forms of democracy. The thesis seeks to elaborate on the research question of "What is the role of the new right on the understanding of democracy in selected CEC countries?". The primary methodological preference of the thesis is qualitative as the topic is longitudinal and also secondary data is used. The study analyses how successful far-right parties achieve translating the far-right ideological principles into illiberal democracy principles. In this study three mainstream parties (including Smer-SD which is not a mainstream party but in power in Slovakia) and three new right/far-right parties are selected from Hungary, Poland and Slovakia to analyse their party manifestos to examine the parameters of illiberal democracy and new right principles. The data collection covers the term between 2004 and the present. We critically reviewed the literature on the new right and illiberal democracy to determine the themes (parameters) creating the relationship of two research variables leading to our proposed research model. The model and the main themes, themes and sub-themes are derived from the literature review process of new right and illiberal democracy using CDA perspective. All the party manifestos in English were analysed by using NVivo 12. The analysis shows that the conditions of the type of democracy may have links to the political system and political parties in selected case countries. In general, the analysis of the manifestos of the sampled parties shows that there has been a tendency towards eroding some neo-liberal and democratic values. By looking at case studies from three CECs, in conclusion, there appeared to be in-depth relationships of the new right parameters and the level of the democracy succeeded in a country. Keywords: Illiberal democracy, new right, party manifestos, CECs.