ABSTRACT
This chapter scrutinises how the European Union (EU) deals with crisis in the quality of democracy in Member States, and how it seeks to safeguard European values at the supranational level. The chapter argues that the past and current debates on the power of the EU to safeguard its common values at the supranational level are an illustration of the tensions that the establishment of the EU as a political regime engenders between and among EU and domestic actors. It shows that while the input and throughput legitimacy of the new rule of law framework is highly supranationalised, the output remains intergovernmental. The chapter draws on a series of documents issued by the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council following the success of the Freedom Party in Austria in 1999 as well as those issued after the reforms adopted in Hungary and in Poland in 2011 and respectively in 2015.
