1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 8 Protecting the rule of law and the state of democracy at the supranational level Political dilemmas and institutional struggles in strengthening EU’s input, output and throughput legitimacy Ramona Coman Introduction The rule of law is one of the fundamental dimensions of the quality of demo- cracy (see also Morlino in this volume; see also Pérez-Linan and Noah Smith in this volume). Since the beginning of the 1990s onwards, the European Union (EU) has been an active international actor involved in the promotion of demo- cracy and the rule of law. Through its external policies and agreements, it has sought to act as a normative power (Manners 2002, 2008) and to spread its norms and values as guidelines for those political and social actors in its neigh- bourhood keen to strengthen the democratic foundation of their political regimes. The outcomes on the ground reveal a mixed picture (Coman and Commaille 2016). As Leonardo Morlino puts it in this volume, ‘the problem is not under- standing or deining these values (…). The problem remains that of effective implementation’. As Philippe Schmitter underlined in his chapter, ‘the gap between what democracy promises them and what it delivers seems to be widen- ing’, not only outside the EU but also within its Member States. Instead of exam- ining the international dimension of democratisation, this chapter reveals the challenges that the promotion of democratic norms and values pose internally to the EU itself. In other words, this chapter scrutinises how the EU tries to safe- guard its common values when they are put at risk in Member States. The puzzle to be understood in this chapter can be summarised as follows. Over the last decades, the EU institutional actors have had to deal with a series of situations which made headlines owing to their potential to undermine the quality of democracy, the rule of law and, generally speaking, the common Euro- pean values (see Wolff 2013; Van Bodgandy and Ioannidis 2014; Coman 2015). As a reminder, in the 2000s, for the irst time in the history of the integration process, the Fourteen EU Member States suspended their relations with Austria as a result of the participation of the Freedom Party (FPO) in the Austrian gov- ernment (Bribosia et al. 2000). The EU institutional actors deplored the lack of clear procedures on how to deal with such cases. In October 2017, following legislative elections, the country’s main conservative party led by Sebastian 572 08 Challenges 08.indd 142 12/3/18 15:43:25