Assessing the diversity of anti-establishment and populist politics in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

The more populism enters public debates, the more it needs close scrutiny. Central and Eastern Europe offers a useful context for exploring the diversity of parties identified as populist. Anti-establishment rhetoric provides a suitable conceptual starting point because of its pervasive role in the region’s political discourse. Using a new expert survey, this article details the relationship between anti-establishment salience and political positions, showing that anti-establishment parties occupy a full range across both economic and cultural dimensions and many occupy more centrist positions. Narrowing the focus to content analysis of anti-establishment parties’ thin ideology in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, it is concurrently found that for many actors (including those usually labelled as populist) anti-establishment rhetoric is indeed predominant, yet not always extensively combined with other elements of populism: people-centrism and invocation of general will. The findings are important for understanding multiple varieties of anti-establishment politics also beyond the region.

Keywords:

• Political parties
• populist
• anti-establishment
• Central and Eastern Europe
• left and right

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sarah Engler is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Political Science, University of Zurich. She holds a PhD from the University of Bern where she graduated in August 2018. In her dissertation, she analysed the survival and transformation of centrist anti-establishment parties in Central and Eastern Europe. Previous work has been published in West European Politics. Her current research covers the politicisation of democratic principles, democratic quality and populism in Western and Eastern Europe. [[email protected]]

Bartek Pytlas is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, LMU Munich. He is the author of the award-winning book Radical Right Parties in Central and Eastern Europe. Mainstream Party Competition and Electoral Fortune (Routledge 2015), among other publications. His current project focuses on strategic patterns of anti-establishment politics across Europe. [[email protected]]

Kevin Deegan-Krause is Associate Professor of Political Science, Wayne State University, Detroit. He is the author of Elected Affinities: Democracy and Party Competition in Slovakia and the Czech Republic (Stanford 2006) and editor of several volumes and ECPR Political Data Yearbooks. His current project focuses on newer parties in newer democracies. [[email protected]]

Notes

1 For the sake of convenience, we will only use the term ‘anti-establishment rhetoric’ in the sections that follow. The wording of the question we asked (retrospectively) to all country experts was as follows: ‘We would like you to consider the salience (i.e. importance) of the following issues for Party X in the electoral campaign of the national parliamentary elections between YYYY and YYYY: salience of anti-elite and anti-establishment rhetoric (0 not important at all; 10 extremely important)’. According to our understanding, anti-elite and anti-establishment rhetoric does not differ substantially and both can include the political establishment/elite as well as other types of dominant groups in the society (such as the economic elite, intellectual elite etc.) However, we are aware that there is the possibility that these two terms might not be considered by everyone as interchangeable. The reasons to include both terms in the questions have been twofold: first, it allows a direct comparison with the data of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey that uses the same wording (r = 0.89) and, second, including both terms minimises the risk that claims against the elite or the establishment are not reported. In addition, we have provided a definition to all experts in order to make sure they have a common understanding of the question: ‘Those engaging in anti-establishment rhetoric explicitly identify with “ordinary people” and contrast themselves against a separate and coherent “political class” that is composed of all political opponents undifferentiated by party affiliation and may also (but need not) include economic, intellectual and/or international elites.’

2 Since the survey is conducted retrospectively, for each party of each election we asked the following question: ‘Now, we would like you to self-assess your judgement in the last two questions. How confident are you of your responses on [party] for each election? (1 very uncertain; 4 very confident).’ We excluded answers that are too uncertain to consider (responses with a confidence level lower than 3).

3 The data on anti-establishment rhetoric has been combined with the Chapel Hill survey using the version that follows an election, i.e. 2009 and 2010 elections: 2010 data; 2011‒2014 elections: 2014 data.

4 Government participation can be a reason for the reduction of anti-establishment rhetoric that might in some cases lead to the transformation of an AEP to a non-AEP (as it is the case for GERB and Fidesz between 2009 and 2014). However, as the cases of governing parties among AEPs (SNS in 2010, SaS in 2012 and NA in 2010) and the numerous opposition parties among the non-AEPs illustrate, the government‒opposition pattern is not the main determinant of the classification into AEP/non-AEP. Moreover, when looking at the patterns over time, the differences between AEPs and non-AEPs are usually larger than the changes of a single party over time (see Figures A1 and A2 in the online appendix for an illustration of Poland and Slovakia). For example, while PiS had its lowest value of anti-establishment rhetoric while in government in 2007 (7.6), the value is still much higher than the values of PO while in opposition (never higher than 6.4). The same is true for SNS in Slovakia. It had its lowest salience while in government (2012: 3.7); but this was still higher than the highest salience among non-AEPs, even while in opposition (2.2). Smer is an exception, since it has clearly transformed from an AEP (former centrist populist, see Učeň 2007) with a high salience of anti-establishment rhetoric during its first two terms in opposition into a non-AEP since 2010. It had a slightly higher anti-establishment salience than the average in opposition in 2012, that was, however, still low in absolute terms.

5 The populist radical right is defined as a combination of populism with nativism and authoritarianism (Mudde 2007). The definition thus includes these elements of the cultural dimension, while the economic position can vary. Academic debate on definitional standards for the populist radical left in Western Europe are much scarcer; however, parties are usually considered as populist radical left when they combine economic leftist stances with populist elements (March 2007, 2017, see also Bernhard and Kriesi 2019). For AEPs with strong neoliberal and/or strong libertarian stances there is no common term.

6 The ideological mainstream is defined as the opposite of radical left (i.e. no extreme leftist position on the economic dimension) and the opposite of the radical right (i.e. no extreme traditionalist/authoritarian/nationalist position on the cultural dimension; Hanley and Sikk 2016: 523).

7 It is important to mention that those parties are usually new parties which often transform ideologically and/or abandon their anti-establishment discourse over time and thereby cease to be a centrist populist party. See for example GERB in Figure 4 that does not transform ideologically, but in 2014 belongs to the group of non-AEPs. This is important when it comes to the case selection for the second part of the analysis that focuses on the most recent election up to 2016 (e.g. Slovakia 2016, Poland 2015 and Czech Republic 2013). By the time of these latter elections, two former centrist AEP parties, Smer and Your Movement (formerly Palikot’s Movement), had reduced their anti-establishment salience to a point below the election-wide average and therefore are not included in the sample of AEPs (see online appendix, Figures A1 and A2).

8 Data on challengers that did not cross the electoral threshold (Razem, KORWiN) or those that entered national parliaments unexpectedly (SR, ĽSNS) are missing in the expert survey. For these actors, anti-establishment salience was estimated by a holistic analysis of electoral manifestos, as well as campaign events reported in traditional media.

9 In two cases in Poland, social media profiles of party leaders (Janusz Korwin-Mikke, currently leading the extra-parliamentary party Freedom of Janusz-Korwin Mikke; as well as Robert Winnicki of Ruch Narodowy) were coded instead of party profiles. Focusing on the person of Korwin-Mikke is due to his iconic status among the supporters of his personal vehicle parties, such as KORWiN, and allows a more rigorous analysis than the assessment of his ephemeral political projects. Coding the profile of Robert Winnicki, on the other hand, allows continuity following the deletion of Ruch Narodowy’s Facebook profile. The claims of Winnicki can be seen as exemplary of RN discourse due to his central role as party leader and as the only remaining formal member of Ruch Narodowy in the Polish Parliament, after several members of RN elected to the Sejm from the Kukiz lists left the party in May 2016.

Additional information

Funding

Since October 2018, the research of Bartek Pytlas is funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), grant no. 391643469. Part of the paper was written during Sarah Engler’s research stay at the European University Institute, Italy, that was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. P1BEP1-172267). The conducting of the expert survey was largely financed by the UniBern Forschungsstiftung (grant no. 61/2015).