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- The United States National Security Strategy, released in December, mirrors far-right and pro-Russian narratives, creating fresh political oxygen for populist playbooks in CEE region. Satisfying the strategic autonomy idea, Brussels is slowly getting hawkish about defence modernisation and AI.
- But ‘strategic investment’ ambition is colliding with fiscal reality: end-of-year debt levels constrain manoeuvre across the region and the brief flags a three-way collision between electoral commitments, tighter budgets and new Brussels-driven demands such as ‘AI factories’ and defence.
- Andrej Babiš’s victory placated the populists, but is unlikely to cause a ripple effect in the region, overshadowed by greater fragmentation and salient issues pertaining to the rule of law.
- The EU’s plan to phase out Russian gas by late 2027 risks turning into a carve-out regime, with Slovakia and Hungary securing transitional exemptions under existing Gazprom contracts while Budapest continues betting on TurkStream and Paks II.
- Enlargement is again treated as a security instrument, negotiated in two speeds: Albania opened the final negotiating cluster on 17 November, while Ukraine’s accession track is increasingly pulled into war fatigue and seductive political messaging before the elections.
This overview draws on insights from our weekly outlooks, which continuously monitor democratic security trends in CEE, as well as contributions from Visegrad Insight fellows across the region.
Andrej Babiš was sworn in as Czech Prime Minister, marking the populist ANO party’s return to power.
The newly-released European Union Democracy Shield and the Strategy for Civil Society offer promising potential, yet their enforcement will depend on domestic political will.
At the same time, the Council and Parliament reached a provisional agreement to phase out Russian gas by late 2027.
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How CEE politics shapes the policies of the EU
Europe ended 2025 still adjusting to a harsher environment. President Donald Trump’s conditional messaging did not deliver strategic clarity, but it did push governments towards coordination as a hedge against Washington’s volatility. At the same time, domestic polarisation across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is tightening the space for long-term policy making. It is therefore essential to aggregate voices defending European values and freedoms from CEE and bring them into the European Union (EU) policy debate.
Over the period of October until December 2025 the Visegrad Insight team and fellows have been mapping trends and scanning for potential triggers of change across global democratic and economic security dynamics that would be particularly pronounced in the European Union from the perspective of Central Eastern Europe. From collective defence and industrial mobilisation to energy decoupling, fiscal constraints, rule of law crises, information governance and enlargement we . It tracks EU-level instruments and stress points that are already shaping member state positions, including the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) framework, the agreement to phase out Russian gas by late 2027, enforcement under the Digital Services Act and the rollout of the European Union Democracy Shield and the European Union Civil Society Strategy. The analysis is informed by the Foresight on European Values and Democratic Security (FEVDS) process, including the scenario-based discussions convened in autumn and winter this year.
CEE faces overlapping stressors, including fatigue over Russia’s war against Ukraine, malign influence operations, polarisation and the sustained pressure on oversight institutions and independent media. The region’s reliance on external guarantees, capital and supply chains makes it both a frontline and a test case for wider European cohesion. The EU response will be judged less by new labels and more by whether strategies translate into domestically-enforceable rules, credible regulators and resilient institutions.
Collective Defence or Unilateral Action
Europe ended 2025 still adjusting to a harsher environment: President Donald Trump’s conditional messaging did not deliver strategic clarity, but it did push governments towards coordination as a hedge against Washington’s volatility. The new United States National Security Strategy, released in December, calls for building up ‘healthy nations’ in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe while borrowing language about Europe ‘erasing’ its own civilisation and demographic decline, closely mirroring far-right and pro-Russian narratives that frame the West as doomed. More pointedly, it urges ‘cultivating resistance within European nations to Europe’s current trajectory’, which reads less like strategic guidance and more like an invitation to the populist playbooks of Viktor Orbán and Robert Fico.
‘The perception of the National Security Strategy is therefore positive among governing elites, but polarising among populist and nationalist factions, who see it as a chance to amplify anti-globalist narratives’, argues Radu Albu-Comănescu, Visegrad Insight 2020 Fellow from Romania. ‘The NSS pushes for higher NATO readiness, Romania may increase defence budgets for the two years to come: this could become a campaign issue, either framed as ‘necessary for security’ or ‘wasteful spending’.
Europe, meanwhile, is doing what it does best under pressure: building instruments and calling it strategy. CEE countries have benefited from the European Union’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) instrument, with Poland set to become the largest beneficiary of the 150-billion-euro defence loan framework and Romania expected to take second place, receiving over 16 billion euros over five years. A barter-style modernisation model is emerging along the eastern flank. Poland is preparing to send additional MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine in exchange for Ukrainian-developed drone and missile technology, while Romania is exploring drone production cooperation with Ukraine using the SAFE funds. Warsaw is also signalling a preference for hard enablers over symbolic cooperation, including renewed momentum on the Orka submarine programme with like-minded suppliers such as Sweden and plans to launch its first military satellite.
Between Dependence and Interdependence
The Council and Parliament reached a provisional agreement to phase out Russian gas by late 2027. However, Slovakia and Hungary have managed to secure transitional exemptions allowing them to continue imports under existing Gazprom contracts in the next two years. But rather than winding down their dependencies on Russia, Slovakia and Hungary’s exemptions now allow continued imports under existing Gazprom contracts over the next two years, while Budapest keeps betting on TurkStream and Paks II. The next months will test whether the 2027 deadline becomes a coordinated decoupling effort or a patchwork of carve-outs that prolongs Moscow’s leverage, even as the European Union continues to widen pressure on Russia’s shadow fleet by sanctioning additional individuals and organisations linked to restricted tankers.
‘Lithuania had completely stopped importing Russian gas in April 2022. Lithuania demonstrated that it is possible by showing its political will. Hungary and Slovakia should do the same, as we think in Lithuania’, says Ruslanas Iržikevičius, Senior Fellow at Visegrad Insight based in Vilnius.
Ognyan Georgiev, another fellow from Bulgaria, frames the same dilemma more bluntly from the Balkans: ‘Bulgaria has long since dealt with the issue silently: the Turks repackage it as ‘Turkish gas’ or some other type of mix and the Russian is not included, though it obviously is.’ The uncomfortable reality is that the energy transition is as much about political choice and perception management as it is about the pipes and grids themselves.
This quarter’s events illustrate both momentum and messiness. Bulgaria is accelerating diversification through United States liquefied natural gas imports via the Alexandroupolis terminal in Greece, while the EU has also backed the Bulgaria–Serbia gas link as part of the region’s integration push. Moldova has cut gas transit tariffs on the Balkan corridor to Ukraine by 50 per cent and Romania’s Transelectrica has launched construction of two major 400 kilovolt power lines to strengthen interconnection with Moldova, while Poland’s PERN and NATO’s Infrastructure Investment Unit have moved towards expanding fuel infrastructure and linking it to NATO’s pipeline network. Clearly, the war layer remains inseparable from the energy layer, and this trend is likely to continue in 2026.
Prosperity for All or the Few
Europe awakes to a stark reality it has been so eager to ignore. The new US NSS placed China’s systemic challenge front and centre and, in doing so, also highlighted European vulnerabilities created by strategic dependencies. The push is visible in the European Union’s new industrial push around ‘AI factories’ and increased investments in defence. But budget constraints may make these ideas even harder to implement in reality. End-of-year public debt levels across Central and Eastern Europe remain below the EU average but are high enough to constrain fiscal manoeuvre: Hungary (66.6 per cent of GDP), Slovakia (57.7 per cent), Romania (54.5 per cent) and Poland (50.4 per cent), with Czechia at 43.8 per cent and Bulgaria at 22.3 per cent. The new Czech government’s messaging illustrates the same trap in a different key: Andrej Babiš has said he does not plan to increase the state budget deficit, yet his finance minister has already signalled that a higher deficit for 2026 is ‘probable’ given inherited plans and political realities.
‘Without strong strategic communication responses from public authorities to constantly explain the stakes of the war against Ukraine, people have been left pretty much alone in weighing the costs, the benefits, the risks of [increased military spending]. The silver lining that I see regarding this well-established trade-off is that there are attempts to publicly articulate the idea that it is an opportunity for reindustrialising and bringing back to life some of the lost production capacities. But without clear and very palpable results, such a discursive topic may soon wear out‘, according to Alina Bârgăoanu, Marcin Król Fellow at Visegrad Insight based in Bucharest
Over the next months, the region’s defining economic dynamic is likely to be a three-way collision between electoral commitments, tightening fiscal constraints and a new wave of ‘strategic investment’ demands from Brussels. AI factories and defence offer prestige and potential productivity gains, but only to governments that can ringfence co-financing, secure energy and infrastructure inputs and maintain access to EU funding streams.
POLITICS
Between European Unity and Disunity
ANO’s return to power in Czechia is an alarming development, but the region is far from a nationalist takeover, let alone one with a spillover effect on Brussels. The appointment of Andrej Babiš’s third government on 15 December marked the return of a right-wing populist party to power and revived speculation about a Slovakia–Hungary–Czechia populist triangle, but the V4 presidential summit in Hungary’s Esztergom on 3 December was no revolution. Over the next months, politics in Central Europe is likely to harden into a three-track contest: (one) domestic institutional friction (presidential vetoes, judicial appointments, politicised prosecutions), (two) EU-level wedge issues (migration implementation ahead of mid-2026, climate policy fights such as ETS2, Ukraine financing), and (three) transatlantic narrative spillover.
‘A potential establishment of a functional Budapest-Prague- -Bratislava triangle of populists is the most important development that stems from the end of 2025‘, says Vitaly Portnikov, Visegrad Insight Future of Ukraine Fellow.
‘Such actors, whose discourse is most of the time sovereigntist in substance, play the transnational cooperation card and use the affordances of a transnational, global public communication space without being too disturbed by the irony or contradiction inherent in their discursive behaviour‘, argues Alina Bârgăoanu. Yet the end result will be fragmentation rather than fortification of nationalist narratives. Issue salience for each of the three tracks differs across the respective electorate in every CEE country. The potential formation of such a ‘functional’ populist triangle hinges on whether or not Babiš, Orbán, Nawrocki and others will be wise enough to set the right ‘enemies’.
In Slovakia, the dismantlement of the Whistleblower Protection Office triggered protests under the patronage of Progressive Slovakia, illustrating that institutional rollback can still mobilise, not only depress participation. In Hungary, Medián polling suggested Fidesz had edged up among some voters since September as the contest between Viktor Orbán and Péter Magyar intensified, yet tens of thousands still protested in December over children’s rights and the child abuse scandal. External reference points matter too: the Dutch election, where the centrist D66 finished ahead of the Party for Freedom (PVV), is a reminder that voter fatigue can punish the far right even as incumbents.
State Capture or Independence
Judicial independence is no longer a single tug-of-war between Brussels and populists at home, but a contest over who controls the legal ‘referee’, and whether institutions can be repaired without triggering a crisis. Nowhere is this as evident as in Poland. Waldemar Żurek, Poland’s Minister of Justice, has introduced a draft law to address the controversial issue of ‘neojudges’ appointed by the National Council of the Judiciary (neo-KRS) between 2018 and 2025. It aims to restore judicial independence by categorizing approximately 2,500 neojudges into three groups: a ‘green’ group (around 1,100 judges from the National School of Judiciary and Prosecution) who will automatically retain their positions, a ‘yellow’ group (promoted judges) who will remain in their current courts on a two-year delegation with the option to reapply for their posts, and a ‘red’ group (400 former legal professionals) to be reassigned as court referendaries. President Karol Nawrocki is likely to oppose nominations and, crucially, to test how far presidential prerogatives can be used to slow or block institutional repair.
‘The impact will be zero because nobody understands what it is or how it can be used’, argues Martin Ehl, Senior Visegrad Insight Fellow from Czechia, about the newly announced European Union Democracy Shield (EUDS) and European Union Civil Society Strategy (EUSCS), warning that well-branded instruments can still fail as protective infrastructure if they arrive without clarity, funding pathways and domestic enforcement.
Given these developments, over the next months, Poland will become a stress test for whether rule-of-law ‘restoration’ can be sequenced under hostile cohabitation. The government will try to keep judicial repair incremental and legally defensible, using the Court of Justice judgment on the Constitutional Tribunal as a political and legal anchor for change. Nawrocki, meanwhile, has incentives to treat nominations, referrals and public messaging as a rolling blockade, extending the neo-judge dispute into a broader claim that European courts and domestic reformers are erasing Poland’s sovereignty.
Polarisation or Cohesion
Tens of thousands took to the streets in Slovakia, Czechia and Hungary to protest against the perceived erasure of rule of law oversight mechanisms. This war on democracies is likely to continue in 2026 – on the streets and at the polling stations.
On 31 October, Visegrad Insight convened Hungarian politicians, media representatives and civil society leaders for a series of EU values policy discussions in Budapest structured around the War on Democracies. Democracies at War – EU Values Foresight for the Next Five Years. The new EU democratic security policies were tested against the background of four scenarios to test how Europe can defend the public sphere from disinformation, hybrid attacks and opaque algorithms.Overall conclusions were clear – participants agreed that Europe’s strength lies not only in institutions and funding, but also in the political will, trust and legitimacy that sustain them. They also agreed that, because threat perceptions differ across the continent, there can be no one-size-fits-all approach, even as a shared commitment to democracy and prosperity remains the foundation.
On 3 December, at another event from the series, we also gathered representatives from across Slovak media and policymaking circles Beata Balogova, former editor-in-chief of SME, a Slovak opinion-leading daily, stressed that ‘treating disinformation as something journalists must fix on their own misdiagnoses the problem and lets political actors avoid responsibility’. Hanna Shelest from Ukrainian PRISM, a think tank, emphasised the distinction between classic ‘total defence’ as mainly a government responsibility and national resilience as a broader ecosystem including individual preparedness, agencies, companies and local institutions.
The next months are likely to bring more protests that are locally triggered but structurally similar: disputes over public institutions, the credibility of oversight bodies, media governance and the distributive politics of fiscal adjustments. The EU-level response, now framed through the EUDS and EUSCS, will be tested less by its existence and more by whether it translates into enforceable platform rules, credible regulators and sustained support for independent media and civic actors in the member states where polarisation is already spilling into the streets.
Plurality of Sources
The EU’s regulatory toolkit to tackle disinformation is expanding, but its effectiveness still depends on national capacity and political will – two things that remain unevenly distributed. After Hungarian parties spent over 46 million euros on Facebook political ads, that tap effectively closed when Meta phased out political, electoral and social-issue advertising in the EU from October 2025. In parallel, the media ownership landscape moved again in late October when Ringier sold its Hungarian media portfolio, including the tabloid Blikk, to Indamedia, a group widely seen as close to the Orbán circles.
On 5 December 2025, the European Commission imposed a 120-million-euro fine on X under the Digital Services Act for breaching transparency obligations, including around its verification design, advertising repository and researcher access. Yet, enforcement remains uneven because the Digital Services Act’s respective national enforcement frameworks are still being built, often slowly and sometimes reluctantly. Several member states have faced infringement action for failures linked to appointing and empowering Digital Services Coordinators and putting effective penalty regimes in place.
In the coming months, three dynamics are likely. First, political advertising will not vanish; it will decentralise into harder-to-track formats, increasing the premium on investigative capacity, independent regulators and cross-border cooperation. Second, the Commission will intensify high-profile enforcement against large platforms, but the effectiveness in CEE will hinge on whether national coordinators can act independently and at speed, including when politically sensitive cases land on their desks. Third, media ownership manoeuvres will remain a frontline vulnerability. Defensive measures like ‘strategic’ designations may block hostile takeovers, but they also create new discretionary levers for governments.
Enlarged EU or the Ivory-Tower
Enlargement is a security instrument again, but it is being negotiated in two speeds and in two languages. The first is technocratic: clusters, benchmarks and ‘fundamentals’, where Albania has kept moving, culminating in the opening of the final negotiating cluster (resources, agriculture and cohesion) on 17 November. The second is geopolitical: war termination, United States leverage and European credibility, where Ukraine’s accession track is increasingly treated as part of the bargaining space around a peace deal. Central Europe is not a passive audience to this shift, but it is not a uniform sponsor either: Over the coming months, enlargement will be pulled further into three intersecting fights: war settlement timing, the next Multiannual Financial Framework and domestic ‘wars’ for attention and electoral support.
The practical implication is that the Western Balkans lane will be used as the European Union’s proof-of-life track for the enlargement idea, while the eastern lane remains hostage to war dynamics and the credibility of Western guarantees. If Washington pushes Kyiv towards visible concessions, pressure will grow on the EU to ‘compensate’ Ukraine with faster accession steps even as member states argue over funding and the protection of cohesion budgets. In Central Europe, nationalist actors will keep testing how far anti-Ukraine messaging travels, from ‘Brussels overreach’ tropes to insinuations about corruption and historical grievances.
In Poland, pessimism about Ukraine is rising: a poll shows 65.5 per cent of respondents, up from 61.3 per cent in 2024, believe ties between Warsaw and Kyiv have worsened over the past year, while only 8.6 per cent perceive any improvement. Yet Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy still visited Warsaw on 22 December for talks with Prime Minister Donald Tusk and President Karol Nawrocki on security and European Union accession. Beyond Ukraine, the Western Balkans and Moldova tracks keep producing ‘process’ news: Bulgaria will take over the presidency of the European Union Strategy for the Danube Region in 2026 with Western Balkan integration on its priority list, while Moldova deepened trade reorientation with the European Union absorbing more than 68 per cent of exports.
Authors
Arslan Suleymanov
Wojciech Przybylski
Contributors
Team:
Karolina Choina, Galan Dall, Magda Jakubowska, Tomasz Kasprowicz, Natalia Kurpiewska, Magdalena Przedmojska, Agnieszka Stelmach, Albin Sybera, Luca Soltész.
Fellows:
Radu Albu-Comanescu (Romania), Merili Arjakas (Estonia), Alina Bârgăoanu (Romania), Bohdan Bernatskyi (Ukraine), Marysia Ciupka (Poland), Spasimir Domaradzki (Poland/Bulgaria), Martin Ehl (Czechia), Artur Nowak-Far (Poland), Jan Farfał (Poland), Oksana Forostyna (Ukraine), Philipp Fritz (Germany), Ognyan Georgiev (Bulgaria), Marzenna Guz-Vetter (Poland), Jarosław Gwizdak (Poland), Pavel Havlicek (Czechia), Alina Inayeh (Romania), Ruslanas Iržikevičius (Lithuania), Krzysztof Izdebski (Poland), Staś Kaleta (United Kingdom), Matej Kandrík (Slovakia), Christine Karelska (Ukraine), Aliaksei Kazharski (Belarus/Slovakia), Viktoryia Kolchyna (Belarus), Ádám Kolozsi (Hungary), Filip Konopczyński (Poland), Oleksandr Kostryba (Ukraine), Oleksandr Kraiev (Ukraine), Adam Leszczyński (Poland), Paweł Marczewski (Poland), Michał Matlak (Poland), Asya Metodieva (Bulgaria), Adrian Mihaltianu (Romania), Eva Mihočková (Slovakia), Malina Mindrutescu (Romania), Marta Musidłowska (Poland), Mastura Lashkarbekova (Tajikistan/Poland), Iván László Nagy (Hungary), Marco Nemeth (Slovakia), Valeriia Novak (Ukraine), Vitaly Portnikov (Ukraine), Matej Šimalčík (Slovakia), Jiří Schneider (Czechia), Sandra Sirvydyte (Lithuania), Sigita Struberga (Latvia), Zsuzsanna Szabó (Hungary), Dorka Takacsy (Hungary), Bartosz Wieliński (Poland), Volodymyr Yermolenko (Ukraine), Marcin Zaborowski (Poland) and Edit Zgut-Przybylska (Hungary).
About the project
Visegrad Insight is the main Central European analysis and media platform. It generates future policy directions for Europe and transatlantic partners. Established in 2012 by the Res Publica Foundation.
Foresight on European Values and Democratic Security (FEVDS). This project engages CEE civil society leaders in a foresight-driven debate on the future EU policy developments to protect European values and freedoms.
visegradinsight.eu/foresight-European-values
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
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