Why 2025 CEE’s Protest Matter for Business, Security (December ’25 in CEE)

Why 2025 CEE’s Protest Matter for Business, Security

Looking back at 2025, Central and Eastern Europe could just as well nickname it the year of protests. Large-scale demonstrations erupted in at least five countries across the region, and they shared one common thread: people are exhausted by corruption. They increasingly see it as a direct threat to their security and wealth.

So in this week’s newsletter, we are doing something different. We take a step back and look at the reasons behind these protests—and why they matter for the economy and security.

Why It Matters:

If you want to predict a country’s prosperity, look at its institutions. The relationship between strong institutions and prosperity has been described in detail by Nobel Prize laureates Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in their book Why Nations Fail. Systems that promote individual freedom and property rights, enforce the rule of law, educate their populations, and encourage innovation and entrepreneurship tend to create value. Regimes focused on corruption, clientelism, and the destruction of democratic institutions do not add value—they extract it.

In other words, corrupt regimes are not interested in making the entire nation richer and more competitive. Their goal is to concentrate wealth in the hands of a ruling elite. Instead of investing in proper infrastructure to make doing business easier, or in universities to attract and retain domestic and foreign talent, investments are often hollow—designed primarily to misappropriate state or European funds.

Corruption in the judiciary is particularly damaging. Legal uncertainty can deter entrepreneurial members of society from starting or growing businesses out of fear that their work could be seized or destroyed by a competing oligarch able to buy a favorable court ruling. This ambiguity also drives away foreign capital—and can even push a country’s most promising companies to leave.

There is perhaps no better example than GymBeam, one of the fastest-growing companies to emerge from the eastern Slovak city of Košice. The fitness-focused e-commerce firm became a jewel of the new generation of Slovak businesses, with talk at one point of a stock-market listing.

To accelerate its growth, GymBeam closed a €110 million investment round with Austria’s PortfoLion and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in mid-December. But the investment came with a catch: the investors asked GymBeam to move to Austria. “Austria is a more stable jurisdiction and offers a more predictable business environment. Our investors also accept a headquarters in such a country more easily. Košice is fine, but big investors don’t come here,” GymBeam CEO Dalibor Cicman told the Aktuality news website.

Countries such as Albania, Serbia, Slovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria trail their richer EU counterparts in the Corruption Perceptions Index—and they also lag behind in economic output, ranking among the poorest countries in Europe.

That is not to say no value has been created in countries struggling with corruption. Romania, for example, has become a regional tiger in economic growth and innovation, especially after the 2021 UiPath IPO. But this ecosystem remains sensitive to poor policymaking, which often goes hand in hand with corrupt—and especially authoritarian—regimes.

That fragility resurfaced during the 2025 presidential elections, amid fears the country could receive a junk credit rating if a far-right candidate wins and adopts inadequate austerity measures. We covered this topic in depth in a previous article.

The People Who Stood Up to Corruption

The first major protests of the year began in late January in Serbia. Student-led demonstrations, sparked by a deadly train-station roof collapse in Novi Sad in November 2024, spread rapidly across the country. They culminated in June, with huge rallies rocking Belgrade. An estimated 140,000 people gathered at Slavija Square. Largely peaceful protests were then intercepted by police, who clashed with young demonstrators, journalists, and bystanders. Demonstrators were beaten and even struck by a police acoustic weapon, with dozens detained.

In Hungary, massive protests fueled by frustration with Viktor Orbán’s kleptocratic government and its further clampdown on civil liberties began in March. They escalated into a crowd of more than 100,000 people marching in opposition to the prime minister during a banned Budapest Pride event at the end of June. Further protests followed in December, when tens of thousands took to the streets demanding Orbán’s resignation after videos surfaced showing abuse in state-run juvenile institutions—abuse that critics say the government failed to address.

Even amid a raging war, Ukrainians took to the streets in July to oppose the gutting of anti-corruption agencies NABU and SAPO by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The largest wave of protests since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 forced him to reverse course.

The preservation of the agencies later led to the uncovering of a $100 million corruption scandal led by Zelensky’s former business partner. Even as Ukrainians endured blackouts caused by Russian bombing, members of the president’s inner circle skimmed money from the public nuclear energy company Energoatom’s contracts.

In Slovakia, demonstrations flared on and off throughout the year as Robert Fico’s government introduced largely ineffective consolidation measures that made most people poorer, while stumbling from one political scandal to another. The protests culminated on November 17, 2025—the 36th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution—when opposition parties organized mass rallies in Bratislava and other cities. Speakers warned that Fico’s pro-Russian, anti-EU rhetoric and recent policies, including the disbanding of corruption watchdogs and praise for Russia, were pulling Slovakia “away from the democratic world.” As many as 100,000 people protested nationwide.

From late November through December, a wave of nationwide protests erupted in Bulgaria after the government unveiled its draft 2026 budget. The plan included higher taxes and social contributions, which many Bulgarians saw as regressive and as a cover for entrenched corruption. Tens of thousands of mostly young people filled Sofia’s streets demanding an end to corruption and the government’s resignation. The protests—among the largest in Bulgaria since 1989—forced Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov’s coalition to withdraw the budget, and on Dec. 11, the government resigned under public pressure, just weeks before the country was set to adopt the euro.

Protests spread to Romania in December as well. Nationwide demonstrations erupted after a major corruption exposé. Around 10,000 people marched in Bucharest, with thousands more in other cities, demanding a “clean-up” of the justice system. The protests were triggered by an investigative report and an open letter signed by roughly 700 judges and prosecutors alleging “profound and systemic” abuses of power in the courts.

In Tirana, Albania, thousands of opposition supporters clashed with police in December outside the prime minister’s office, demanding the government’s resignation. The protests were sparked after prosecutors indicted Deputy Prime Minister Belinda Balluku over alleged corruption in large infrastructure contracts. Demonstrators hurled petrol bombs at the building and accused the ruling Socialist government of embezzling “tens or hundreds of millions” of euros.

Not all protests were directly linked to corruption. In Lithuania, demonstrations that began in early December opposed a new law seen as expanding government control over public media.

When Corruption Becomes a Security Threat

To cleanse corruption is essential not only to protect the national economic prospect. It poses a real security risk.

Once a leader or ruling party creates a corrupt, criminal system to extract wealth and concentrate power, it must weaken institutional checks to avoid ending up in prison. At the same time, participants in these schemes often struggle with political succession.

Just look at Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić, Slovakia’s Robert Fico, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, or even the Czech Republic’s Andrej Babiš. The fight for power becomes inseparable from the fight to preserve personal freedom, as defeat could mean incarceration under a more democratic government.

As Anne Applebaum describes in her book Autocracy, Inc., extractionist elites form a global, corporate-like network to stay in power—operating like a cartel to preserve wealth and influence. They rely on kleptocracy, disinformation, surveillance technology, and financial manipulation to enrich elites, suppress dissent, and destabilize the international order. Western democracies generally do not tolerate such grift among their partners, although that argument has weakened to some extent under the administration of Donald Trump.

And this is where the problem becomes acute for Central and Eastern Europe. Joining such a network often means cozying up to Russia or China. In an era of profound geopolitical instability—especially on NATO’s eastern flank—that can mean aligning with potential gravediggers. It undermines the security and defense infrastructure on which CEE countries rely. And there has perhaps never been a worse time to do that than now, as warnings of further Russian aggression against Europe grow louder—and more real.