Critical junctures for democracy: crisis-activated EU leverage and the fragile reversal of autocratisation in North Macedonia (2005–2024)

North Macedonia is one of the few cases in Central and Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans in which a decade of autocratisation was halted and partially reversed. This article asks why a democratic breakthrough achieved in 2015–2017 under intense external engagement subsequently failed to consolidate, even though European Union (EU) engagement formally continued. We conceptualise the 2015–2017 crisis as a critical juncture that did not generate path dependence and explain this outcome through a distinction between two modes of EU influence: crisis-activated leverage, exercised through political mediation, ad hoc institutional engineering, and conjuncturally unified member-state backing, a = +nd routine conditionality, exercised through monitoring, benchmarks, and unanimity-constrained accession procedures. Our argument is that the 2015–2017 reversal was produced by crisis-activated leverage interacting with mass domestic mobilisation and elite realignment; however, precisely because the juncture’s institutional innovations were extraordinary, externally designed, and asymmetrically owned, it lacked the domestic coalitions and reproduction mechanisms that path dependence requires. The findings specify the scope conditions and limits of EU democratic leverage and contribute to debates on halting democratic backsliding, critical junctures, and Europeanisation.