2018 was yet another year with ups and downs for Eastern Europe & Central Asia, a region that continues to throw off the yoke of authoritarianism, which dominated the region from the 1920s until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Although on the surface autocrats and kleptocrats seemed to take even more control of democratic institutions this year, the first cracks in these “illiberal democracies” also started appearing – from Moscow to Budapest, Warsaw to Bucharest. The main highlights of 2018, month by month.

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