This article examines the EU’s recent approach to defending democracy through internal market legislation. It analyses three central instruments – the European Media Freedom Act, the Political Advertising Regulation and the proposed Transparency of Foreign Interest Directive – to show how their political aim of defending democracy comes into tension with their market-centric legal basis in Article 114 TFEU. The article argues that this ‘internal market detour’ is legally sustainable, but normatively ambivalent. While it enables the EU to act in areas where it lacks explicit competences, the approach of channelling the defence of democracy through the language and logic of the internal market also comes with adverse effects, such as reducing democratic actors to market participants. Drawing on deliberative democracy theory, the article frames the ‘internal market detour’ as a ‘tragic choice’ for the European legislature: a path that allows proactive regulatory action in defence of democracy, but at the cost of transparency and democratic expressivity.
Common Market Law Review