Abstract
Central Europe, long considered a model of successful post-communist democratic consolidation, has undergone a dramatic transformation in the early twenty-first century. This study analyses democratic backsliding in the Visegrád Group countries in the period 2023–2026, identifying four key mechanisms of autocratisation: media capture, the securitisation of political repression, the dismantling of institutional checks and economic state capture. The theoretical framework synthesises three complementary concepts: Scheppele’s autocratic legalism, explaining how democracy is dismantled through formally legal procedures; Innes’s theory of state capture, illuminating actor motivations; and Bermeo’s executive aggrandisement, describing its temporal dynamics. Košař and Šipulová’s typology of court-packing (expanding, emptying and swapping) supplies the operational tools. The study reveals marked variation: Hungary is a consolidated autocracy, Slovakia accelerated towards repression after the 2024 assassination attempt, Poland shows the difficulty of democratic restoration after the 2025 presidential election, while the Czech Republic exhibits signs of blocked hybridisation. The findings demonstrate that European integration alone cannot prevent backsliding once domestic safeguards are weakened, and that the principal weakness of the EU response lies not in a lack of instruments but in the political reluctance to deploy them. The study contributes a new hybrid model, ‘Digital Sovereign Corporatism’.