IS IT POSSIBLE THAT INTEGRATION PROCESSES CAN STOP DEMOCRATIC DEGRADATION IN THE STATES THAT INCLUDE IT? AN ANALYSIS OF THE EUROPEAN CASE

In these more than 20 years of the new century we have witnessed the deterioration and regression of democracy in various states. Although democratic regimes continue to be valued positively by much of the Western world, other experiences have gone backwards until reaching systems that we can hardly identify as democratic. The European Union has not been able to escape this phenomenon, where we can find two paradigmatic examples such as the cases of Hungary and Poland. However, upon analyzing it we can see that within the integration scheme there are different mechanisms that limited the advance of democratic regression. The European institutions and regulations that defend democratic values ​​through multiple actions have managed to contain the attacks of autocratic features of the aforementioned cases. To develop the work we will use an exploratory qualitative methodology of a critical analytical nature.