ABSTRACT In this article, we illustrate the effects of the post‐socialist transformation and the resulting politically hybrid contexts on Europeanisation by presenting the case of Napliget, a wealthy village within the Budapest Agglomeration. Our detailed case study of the settlement, within a research project on local planning and development, also represents issues of Europeanisation in an illiberal regime. It is a local example of the U‐turn in the post‐socialist transformation from liberal democracy to autocracy/illiberalism, which affected local governance everywhere, even if in different concrete forms. Drawing on qualitative data from fieldwork and interviews, we examine how EU norms, funding mechanisms, and governance frameworks are interpreted and implemented at the local level. We find that, while Europeanisation can be observed in infrastructure investment and sustainability discourse, its implementation is shaped by domestic political dynamics, neopatrimonial governance and elite‐driven development strategies. The study reveals a form of Europeanisation that is both selective and strategic, whereby local and national elites utilise EU funding and normative frameworks to reinforce their social and political privileges while sidelining principles such as transparency, public accountability and inter‐municipal cooperation. This case demonstrates how the insensitivity of EU institutions to political and institutional contexts leads to ‘Potemkin Europeanisation’ or ‘symbolic compliance’ in environments characterised by centralised decision‐making, entrenched informal networks and weak coordination at the metropolitan scale, typical in this case of post‐socialist illiberalism. In such contexts, EU funds used in (sub)urban development not only deepen spatial and social divides but also reinforce economically inefficient and antidemocratic governance and planning by allowing the illiberal state party and related elites to uncontrolledly appropriate EU funds. With these findings, the paper adds to current discussions on the uneven impact of EU integration.
Csizmady et al. (Sun,) studied this question.