This working paper examines how democracy is discursively constructed and strategically mobilised by symbolic elites in the European Union and three Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries: Armenia, Belarus, and Ukraine. It explores whether a shared democratic discourse exists across these contexts and how convergence or divergence reflects underlying geopolitical dynamics and patterns of norm diffusion. Methodologically, the study combines cross-country comparative discourse analysis with norm diffusion conceptual framework, focusing on how officials, politicians, and civil society actors in the EaP reproduce, adapt, or resist EU-promoted democratic norms. Drawing on a corpus of 237 texts (2014–2024), it employs actor-centred coding and intertextual analysis – paying particular attention to discursive positioning and the modality-evaluation gap – to reveal how institutional asymmetries and geopolitical pressures shape the uptake and transformation of democratic language.