Local democratic resistance to autocratisation: evidence from Budapest, Banja Luka, and Zagreb

Local opposition forces often win local elections in key cities in autocratising countries. However, we still know too little about the interplay between local and national regime developments. The paper unpacks these subnational processes, with new evidence from three case studies in Southeastern and Central Europe: Budapest, Banja Luka, and Zagreb. We systematise a corpus of 26 semi-structured interviews with local experts, activists, and politicians to examine how city-based oppositions can resist autocratisation through three strategies: building coalitions and leaderships, leveraging local institutions, and enhancing media presence and alternative rhetoric. We also examine the incumbent’s response to such local democratic resistance. Our findings illustrate that, even though autocratising agents in the central government retain important levers of power that could limit opposition spillovers, such victories in large cities can provide opposition actors with new channels of resistance from below that could help contain autocratisation.