After a long period of stagnation and decline in democratic governance across the 29 countries of Nations in Transit, 2016 was marked with populist successes that raised fresh doubts about the fragile post–Cold War order. In Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, years of populism and corruption have eroded once-promising democratic institutions. This year, 18 of the 29 countries in the survey suffered declines in their overall Democracy Scores, the most since 2008. There have been more declines than improvements in each year of the survey since 2005, following the first big wave of EU expansion to the east. For the first time in the report’s history, there are now more Consolidated Authoritarian regimes than Consolidated Democracies. The full report is available here.
Source: Freedom House