Introduction: boom, crisis and politics of Swiss franc mortgages in Eastern Europe: comparing trajectories of dependent financialization of housing

Abstract

This Special Feature is the first regional and holistic comparative study of Swiss franc (CHF) mortgages in Eastern Europe from the mid-2000s up to now. We examine this form of lending as a critical mechanism of the dependent financialization of housing in the region and look at its political and class-based repercussions in the four most significant national cases: Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Serbia. This introduction reviews and connects the so far largely separate threads of research on CHF lending (on its political economy, partisan and movement politics, and debtors’ experiences), summarizes the case studies, and draws out their key comparative insights. While lending waves originated in the same macrostructural relations and produced similar booms and crises, the management of the crises diverged significantly, depending on macroeconomic conditions, the projects of political elites, and debtors’ class background and modes of contestation. The two main openings for contestation were litigation and political pressure, with varied limitations and results across national contexts. While delivering some important achievements, the politics of debtors’ movements remained limited to a single-issue and legalistic contestation of specific predatory lending practices, which ultimately defended mortgaged homeownership from excessive financial predation. This reflects middle-class debtors’ position in the multi-scalar hierarchies of dependent financialization, and the fact that litigation was the main state infrastructure available for their contestation. We argue that more progressive reactions to housing financialization would require movement infrastructures that are able to address the multiple scales of dependent financialization, and forms of cross-class local organization that are able to pursue agendas beyond available state infrastructures.

Keywords:

• debtors’ movements
• Eastern Europe
• dependent financialization
• housing
• Swiss franc mortgages

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

2 Without Latvia, Romania and Slovakia.

3 In Poland, the term ‘indexed’ denotes CHF loans where the contract expressed the principal in the zloty but the bank then converted this to the franc to determine the repayment installments, while denominated loans skipped this step and expressed the principal in the franc. In both cases, however, the entire cash flow (the issuance and repayment of the loan) was in the domestic zloty (Żywicka 2018, 11). Both types were common (UKNF 2016, 30). In Hungary, Croatia and Serbia, ‘denominated’ loans as per the Polish terminology dominated, but while they are described as such in Hungary, the term of choice in Croatia and Serbia is 'indexed'.

4 This data is only available from 2010 onwards for Croatia and from 2013 onwards for Serbia.

Additional information

Funding

Authors’ work on this special issue and introduction was supported by, for Agnes Gagyi, the Swedish Research Council FORMAS [grant number 2016-00258] and for Marek Mikuš, the German Research Foundation (DFG) Emmy Noether Programme [project no. 409293970].

Notes on contributors

Agnes Gagyi

Agnes Gagyi (University of Gothenburg) is a sociologist working on social movements and politics in Eastern Europe. Email: [email protected]

Marek Mikuš

Marek Mikuš (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) is a social anthropologist studying civil society, the state and finance in East-Central and South East Europe. Email: [email protected]