Power of the Purse: Authoritarian Attacks on Local Officials

“It’s an all-out war in the case of Hungary, Poland, and Turkey […] we are enemy number one for the national government because they want to centralize power. They want to change the parameters of the game. […] They’re taking away our prerogatives, they’re taking away our money by changing the tax code, […] they play with the criteria, and they make it difficult for us to realize our priorities.”
–Rafał Trzaskowski, mayor of Warsaw

On March 18, 2025, the ruling party of Hungary, Fidesz, passed a draconian law which, under the guise of “child protection,” outlaws all pro-LGBTQ+ demonstrations in the country. Then in June, and in defiance of the government, Budapest held the largest pride parade in its history. In response the government opened an investigation into Gergely Karácsony, the mayor of Budapest, eventually charging him in February of 2026 for organizing and leading an unlawful assembly.

Hungary is not the first country whose would-be authoritarian government has abused its power to attack local officials. Only one day after Hungary passed its anti-LGBTQ+ law, Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu lost his appeal against spurious charges of corruption and terrorism and was arrested and removed from office. İmamoğlu has long been considered one of the most popular potential opponents of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the upcoming presidential elections, and his arrest caused nationwide protests against the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

If attacking local leaders results in instability and protest, why do autocratizers do so? The power of mayors and local officials pales in comparison to that of central governments. Are local officials really a threat to would-be authoritarians?

The answer is, surprisingly, yes. Authoritarians don’t just fear individual officials—they fear the grassroots power they can build. In a 2022 article in the Journal of Democracy, authors Will Freeman and Lucas Perelló argue that opposition parties “play the long game” in countries undergoing democratic erosion by building a mass-party organization, starting from the ground up. They highlight how, in Honduras, holding subnational office was a key component of this strategy, because it allowed the opposition to build a local organizing and support base. Former IGCC Dissertation Fellow and assistant professor at Hong Kong Baptist University Julian Michel concurs, showing how the resources and notability gained through subnational office are key to restricting executive aggrandizement, the process through which a would-be authoritarian government consolidates power. Safia Farole’s research into local government in South Africa corroborates this point by indicating how local opposition mayors can raise their party’s national vote share simply by being good at their jobs—something that İmamoğlu himself explicitly endorses as a strategy to unseat Erdoğan. My own research into Poland highlights how local opposition officials, during the Law and Justice (PiS) government, leveraged their fiscal resources to combat the government’s anti-immigrant and anti-abortion agenda, and how they used their funds to support local seniors and businesses that slipped through the cracks of the welfare system during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Apart from arrest and persecution there is another, perhaps more insidious, way to kneecap local opposition. In the overwhelming majority of democratic countries, central governments can relatively easily make seemingly innocuous changes that have far-reaching consequences for the fiscal independence of local governments. By limiting local fiscal independence—increasing mandatory local expenses while decreasing access to autonomous funding sources—would-be authoritarians severely restrict the ability of their subnational opponents to prove their governing competency, protect their vulnerable constituents, or allocate funds strategically to gain allies among local elites.

In fact, there is a strong argument to be made that this type of financial manipulation is much more prevalent than the use of brute force. In their seminal work, Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World, Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman note that contemporary democratic backsliding is incremental, gradually eroding the foundations of democracy to consolidate power. The strategy of attacking local fiscal autonomy falls neatly into this description, because it possesses the additional benefit of inscrutability: subnational funding often relies on complex algorithms and comes from myriad sources, ranging from local taxation to national grants to user fees such as bus tickets or sewer service charges. Even when changes are larger and more noticeable, central governments typically couch these in the language of fiscal efficiency, debt servicing, or, in the case of the United States, dubious claims of fraud. This means that a lot of these moves may pass entirely unnoticed or be credited as positive by citizens at the time of their enactment, thus limiting the potential for backlash.

There are numerous examples of would-be autocrats fiscally squeezing local officials in recent years. During their rule in Poland, the PiS government repeatedly overburdened opposition municipalities with mandatory expenses, especially in the field of education, without providing adequate compensatory funding. Naturally, the large, urban, opposition-held municipalities with the most students suffered the largest increase in expenses. In the United States, the Trump administration has repeatedly issued threats of funding cuts, or has actively cut funding to cities and states that do not comply with the agenda of the executive branch. The overwhelming majority of these cuts have been targeted at his subnational Democratic opponents, under the guise of fiscal efficiency or rooting out alleged fraud. In Hungary, the Fidesz government has instituted a so-called “solidarity” tax, with the alleged goal of equalizing funding levels between rural and metropolitan municipalities. The tax, which overwhelmingly penalizes municipalities held by opposition mayors, has led Budapest to the brink of bankruptcy, according to mayor Karácsony.

Unfortunately, there is no obvious way to completely safeguard local funding. While enshrining some protections for local fiscal autonomy in the constitution can be an effective delaying tactic, it is not foolproof; both Hungary and Poland had such constitutional protections, which were circumvented by PiS and amended by Fidesz. Another strategy is to make the cuts more visible to the public and thereby to help stoke the backlash and public outcry that would-be authoritarians fear the most. This is in part the strategy that Karácsony, İmamoğlu, and Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski have tried to implement through the foundation of the international Pact of Free Cities group and through their individual advocacy at high personal cost.

The world is undeniably facing a wave of democratic erosion; according to the latest Varieties of Democracy Project Annual Report, democracy has receded to levels not seen after, ironically, 1984. We are, as Trzaskowski states, in an “all-out war” for democratic survival, where would-be authoritarians are increasingly learning from each other’s methods for expanding their power. In this context, it is critical to study, identify, and publicize any strategy they use to further their goals. Local government finance, admittedly a somewhat dry subject, has been mostly ignored as a potential tool against democracy. In order to combat the rising threat of autocracy, we need to start paying more attention.

Theodoros Ntounias is a PhD candidate in political science at UC San Diego and IGCC Dissertation Fellow from Athens, Greece. He studies contemporary challenges to democracy in a comparative perspective.

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