Recent scholarship paid particular attention to regimes between liberal democracy and dictatorship (the "grey zone"). Regimes like defective, delegative, managed, guided, illiberal democracies, liberal autocracies, competitive authoritarian or electoral authoritarian systems, together with "democraduras" and "dictablandas" are all make up the group of hybrid or mixed regimes. While theoretical considerations are vital in clarifying these concepts in the post-transitology era when "authoritarianism goes global" and democracy seems to be on decline, parallel to this venture, we wish to investigate hybrid regimes in Europe in a comparative perspective. Already in the 1990s several European countries were considered as hybrid regimes those were considered as sort of "natural phenomena" of the pre-EU-accession period. Twenty years after there is a new wave of hybridization, but the directions of change is different. It cannot be interpreted as transitory phenomena, quite the opposite: More established democracies have been hollowed out and started to decline. While the cases of Western Balkans, Turkey and Ukraine deserve close attention, the novelty in hybrid regimes can be identified in the fact that a hybrid regime (i.e. non-democracy) appeared within the European Union itself. The contradiction between the values of the EU (liberal democracies) and the reality, which makes de-democratization possible, is striking. De-democratization in Hungary is a unique process but Poland, Greece and other countries are also drifting from liberal democracy further down the road. This is not just a problem of few countries: it is a European problem which needs to be discussed.