Democratic Backsliding and the Unravelling of the EU Legal Order

The political world of the EU has often been accused of being a Potemkin village. It had a flag, a parliament and elections, but behind this faade the voters were not really engaged. 1 This has fueled a tendency to easily perceive existential crises for the Union. With no real European demos, EU political institutions were seen as hollow and commentators found it easy to predict that they would be swept away when faced with a serious political problem. However, the Union's legal situation was the opposite. Here a fairly modest institutional impression, namely a single international court sitting in Luxembourg, belied a deeply integrated, almost federal, legal order in which national courts across the Union applied EU law and rulings of the Court of Justice day in day out in the cases that came before them

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