EU Rule of law crisis – Article 2 TEU – EU values – EU fundamental rights – Freedom of speech – Member state courts – Interpretation of national law in conformity with Article 2 TEU values – Preliminary reference – Duty of referral – Criminal liability of judges – Reverse Solange – ASJP judgment – Judicial applicability of Article 2 TEU – Value-oriented interpretation of EU law – Mutual Amplification – Essence of EU fundamental rights – L.M. judgment – Aranyosi judgment – Federal balance – Red lines – Systemic deficiencies – Solange presumption – Mutual trust

Separation of institutions, functions and personnel – Checks and balances – Hungary, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia – Short tradition of separation of powers in Central Europe – Fragile interwar systems of separation of powers – Communist principle of centralisation of power – Technocratic challenge to separation of powers during the EU accession – One-sided checks on the elected branches and empowering technocratic elitist institutions – Populist challenge to separation of powers in the 2010s – Re-politicising of the public sphere, removing most checks on the elected branches, and curtailing and packing the unelected institutions – Technocratic and populist challenges to separation of powers interrelated more than we thought

Populist politicians have to deal with a foundational paradox, i.e. ruling without being contaminated by the corrupting influence of power - Strategies to shield populists’ political actions from the accusations that populist parties have flung against pre-existing elites – The Italian Five Star Movement as a populist political discourse resorting to legalist strategies – Legalism as a way of introducing political reforms as mandatory actions, required by some sort of exclusionary, pre-existing legal rule rather than the product of ideological confrontation and political compromise – Populism as an anti-political response to factionalism – Lottery system, absolute neutrality and the end of politics

The rise of populism in Central and Eastern Europe as a broader democratic crisis – Developments in Hungary, Poland and Romania indicate failure of representative politics post-1989 – Reorienting politics towards a deliberative democratic culture can help answer the bottom-up critique exploited by populists – Citizen-centric deliberative approaches take seriously long-standing discontent with liberal democracy and can provide an alternative to populism

Counter-revolution by law in Hungary and Poland – Populism as a distinctive political project that mobilises anti-liberal conservative forces in society – Populist attempt to dismantle liberal-constitutional institutions in the name of a conservative, illiberal project – Populist critique of legal fundamentalism, understood as an excess of liberal legal norms, as a key dimension in the conservative, populist project

Institutionalisation – Populism – Rule of law – Poland – Hungary – Post-communist reformers more given to emulation, adoption and installation, than institutionalisation – Institutionalised traditions as resources and sources of recalcitrance – New populists as institutionalisers of anti-rule of law values, de-institutionalisers of independent institutions – ‘Abusive constitutionalists’, who erode and subvert the kinds of institutionalisation necessary to temper power