Is democracy deteriorating in Europe?

Yesterday the American organization Freedom House published its yearly report on freedom in the world's countries. While rankings always contain a measure of simplification and discretion in terms of adopted criteria, Freedom House reports are regularly released since the 1970s and constitute an established reference point to analyze trends of democracy in the world.

In the report, countries are assigned a score between 1 and 14 (the lowest the score, the better the freedom situation in the country). According to their score, the only European countries that are not considered free are Russia, Belarus, Azerbaijan, and Turkey. However, a few other countries are considered only partially free – including five Western Balkan countries, with Serbia being the exception (but the report explicitly points at “Aleksandar Vučić’s authoritarian tendencies”).

If we look at the evolution undergone by the European countries during the last 10 years, many of them kept their score intact, meaning that they remained as free as they used to be. A few countries did actually improve their performance: except for Italy, all of them are located in south-east and Eastern Europe (Croatia, Kosovo, Moldova, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia).

However, the list of European countries where democracy has been deteriorating in the last decade is a longer one, and it includes very serious cases – such as Turkey's and Hungary's. Among the others, according to Freedom House the state of democracy in Greece, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia has also been slightly worsening.