Populism in Central and Eastern Europe – Challenge for the Future

With “Populism in Central and Eastern Europe – Challenge for the Future” we present a collection of contributions to a seminar and an open panel debate organised by the Green European Foundation (GEF) with support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation Warsaw and the Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities (SWPS) on 22 and 23 October 2012 in Warsaw, Poland.

These events were part of a multiannual GEF project which built on the book publication “Populism in Europe” (2011), which was translated and published in German in 2012 as “Rechtspopulismus in Europa”. This GEF publication presents the phenomenon of right-wing populism from a variety of thematic angles and national perspectives. It touches upon the similarities as well as the differences between European cases of populism, and several authors discus show Greens and progressive parties in particular should respond to this phenomenon. Book presentations and round tables were then organised by GEF and its partner organisations in venues as diverse as Malta and Finland, Athens and Ireland to continue the discussion.

A year into these debates the political context had shifted. In the wake of Europe’s financial, economic and social crisis, the (right-wing) populist argumentation had partly moved from a cultural to a socio-economic one, playing with European north-south / east-west divisions. Political cleavages along the left-right axis came back to the fore, and we witnessed an accompanying rise of traditional and populist movements on the left side of the political spectrum. Election results throughout Europe paid tribute to the fact that political populism seems to have become a permanent feature of our democratic political systems.

With this in mind we considered it highly important to focus specifically on the cases of CEE countries in 2012, as the challenges of populism have become equally pressing here while at the same time seemingly less documented. In a two-day workshop with young scientists from Poland, Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, the rise of populism in the CEE region was a matter of intense debate and exchange of opinions. The discussion focused on questions of populist politics (based on political thought/ideology content) and at the same time presented the populist way of doing politics with several examples from the region. Is there a way of changing the narrative from“politics of fear” to politics of “freedom and security” also in Central and Eastern Europe? With the region’s high representation of populist politics in government and the high presence of populist ideology in the public sphere this remained one of the most pressing questions of the debates.

We express our sincere thanks to those who made this project a reality. First, project coordinator Szymon Bachrynowski, PhD from the Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities, who has put a lot of effort into the workshop and the report alike and who was assisted by Lila Religa from the Heinrich Böll Stifung Warsaw office. This collection would not have been possible without the experts participating being willing to summarize their thoughts into articles – a big thank you for sharing your expertise! And last but not least our thanks go to Prof. Wawrzyniec Konarski, PhD, from Poland and Dick Pels, PhD, from the Netherlands who contributed their opening and concluding remarks to the seminar and this collection.

We hope you will find this collection of articles an interesting read and it will enrich your reflection on the topics at hand. If – as Dick Pels puts it in his concluding article - “resistance to European integration and to the local elites which promote it” will truly become the point of convergence for populist movements and parties across the East-West divide in Europe – we are sure that the debate we document in this report is here to stay.