Two cheers for populism

The liberal era that opened in central Europe in 1989 decisively closed in the course of 2007. The rest of Europe finally woke up to the fact that populism and illiberalism are rampant in the region. Jaroslaw Kaczynski's ugly and populist government in Poland was unexpectedly defeated in October's general election, but the behaviour of his Law and Justice party in office had alerted the rest of the continent to the depressing trends in central Europe. According to the global Voice of the People survey 2006, central Europe is now the region of the world where citizens are most sceptical about democracy. The liberal parties founded by former dissidents have been marginalised, the liberal language of rights is exhausted, and centrist liberalism is under attack as a philosophy and a practice. The new reality in central Europe is polarisation and populism.

Hungary is in a state of cold civil war between the manipulative postcommunist government (which sparked riots last year by admitting to lying "in the morning, in the evening, and at night") and the populist anti-communist opposition, which keeps its doors open to the extreme right. The Slovak coalition government is a strange mix of nationalism, provincialism and welfarism. In the Czech Republic there is no major problem with the government—but last year, after inconclusive elections, the parties failed to form one for almost seven months. In Romania, the president and parliamentary majority are engaged in open war, with secret-police files from the communist era and corruption files from the postcommunist era the weapons of choice. In Bulgaria, extreme nationalism is surging, and the mainstream parties are accommodating rather than fighting it.

The growing tensions between democracy and liberalism in central Europe, the rise of "organised intolerance," increasing demands for direct democracy and a proliferation of charismatic leaders capable of mobilising public anger—all invite comparisons with the crisis of democracy in Europe between the world wars. It was above all developments in Poland under the Kaczynskis—Jaroslaw's identical twin brother Lech is the country's president—that called up memories of the collapse of democracy in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Between 2005 and this October, Poland was ruled by a coalition of three parties: the right-wing populists of the post-Solidarity Law and Justice party; the postcommunist provincial troublemakers of the Self-Defence party; and the League of Polish Families, descendants of Poland's pre-second world war chauvinist, xenophobic and antisemitic groups. Adam Michnik, editor and former dissident, describes the coalition as employing a mix of the conservative rhetoric of George W Bush and the authoritarian political practice of Vladimir Putin. Writing earlier this year in the New York Review of Books, Michnik set forth the indictment: "Numerous civil servants have been summarily replaced by unqualified but loyal newcomers. The independence of the mass media… was curtailed by changes in personnel instigated by the government and by pressures to control the content of what was published and broadcast… The everyday language of politics has become one of confrontation, recrimination and accusations."



The public atmosphere in Poland in the last days of the Kaczynski government illustrated what American historian Richard Hofstadter called the "paranoid style in politics." The paranoid style sees evidence everywhere of a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine "our way of life." According to the Kaczynski government, ex-communists and their liberal allies had succeeded in creating a public atmosphere in which Catholicism was equated with clericalism, holding to tradition and cultural identity was equated with ignorance, and the word "patriotism" was deleted from the national vocabulary. They blamed the liberal hegemony for destroying the moral community created in the heroic days of Solidarity and for legitimising the economic sway of the former communist elites. The Kaczynski brothers framed the political conflict in Poland as a clash between their new fourth republic and the third republic that prevailed during the postcommunist years of transition (1989–2005). The issue of how to deal with the crimes of the communist past emerged as one of the main symbols of dispute. Liberals insisted on individual responsibility for the wrongdoings of the communist period. The Kaczynski government was, by contrast, prepared to sacrifice the rights of individuals in order to restore society's sense of historical justice.

In the eyes of postcommunist liberals like Michnik, the populist right has acquired the features of what Umberto Eco calls "eternal fascism." The main characteristics of this are a cult of tradition and the rejection of modernisation; irrationalism and anti-intellectualism; an appeal to the frustrated middle class; an obsession with conspiracy and antisemitism; and, of course, fierce anti-pluralism and anti-liberalism.

Yet although it may illuminate the confusion and despair of liberal elites, this "Weimar interpretation" of the crisis in central Europe fails to describe the actual state of affairs. In present-day central Europe, unlike in Europe in the 1930s, there is no ideological alternative to democracy. The economies of the countries in the region are not stagnating, but booming. Standards of living are rising and unemployment is declining. The membership of the central European countries in the EU and Nato provides a safeguard for democracy and liberal institutions. The streets of Budapest and Warsaw today are flooded not by paramilitary formations but by restless consumers in search of a final sale. And in the region's last big electoral contest, in Poland, extreme populism was, after all, decisively defeated.

The central European paradox is that the rise of populism is an outcome not of the failures but of the successes of postcommunist liberalism. By presenting their policies not merely as "good" but as "necessary," liberal elites left their societies with no acceptable way to express dissatisfaction. The transition period was marked by excessive elite control over political processes and by a fear of mass politics. The accession of central European countries to the EU in 2004 virtually institutionalised elite hegemony over the democratic process. Parliament lost its function as a place for major political debates and was reduced to an institution preoccupied with adopting the EU's acquis communautaire. For ordinary citizens, transitional democracies were regimes under which they could change governments but not policies.

In the current debate, "populism" usually refers either to emotional, simplistic and manipulative discourse directed at the gut feelings of people, or to opportunistic policies aimed at "buying" support. But is appealing to people's passions supposed to be forbidden in democratic politics? And who decides which policies are "populist" and which are "sound"? As Ralf Dahrendorf has noted, "one man's populism is another's democracy, and vice versa."

Philippe Schmitter, a respected political scientist, insists that the rise of populist parties can have a positive impact on the new democracies. He acknowledges the downside of populist parties: they undermine existing party loyalties and stable choices between competing partisan programmes, without replacing them with alternative ones; they recruit ill-informed people who do not have consistent preferences and who seek emotional rather than programmatic satisfactions from politics; and they raise expectations that cannot be fulfilled. But at the same time, Schmitter argues, populist parties deconsolidate sclerotic partisan loyalties and open up collusive party systems; they attract previously apathetic citizens and mobilise them to participate in the electoral process. By raising and combining ignored or disparate political issues, populist parties encourage the articulation of suppressed cleavages and demands. They challenge "accepted" external constraints and call into question often exploitative dependencies upon foreign powers.

The experiences of Slovakia and Bulgaria confirm Schmitter's benign view of the impact of populist parties on the democratic system. The coming to power of Robert Fico's government in Slovakia has resulted not in the breakdown of democracy but in increased trust in institutions and in the democratic process. While polls show that only one in five citizens trusted the previous government of Mikulás Dzurinda, every second Slovak trusts Fico's populist government. Trust in parliament has also increased.

The same could be said about the victory of the former King Simeon in Bulgaria. When the ex-king's movement won a landslide election victory in 2001, it was feared that this represented the end of party politics and a rupture with democratic reform. These predictions turned out to be wrong. The ex-king's government contributed to the success of the reform process and to the consolidation of Bulgarian democracy, although his party has lost support and stands a real chance of being left out of the next Bulgarian parliament. In other words, populism has virtues as well as vices, and the latter may not always prevail. Populism is anti-liberal, but it is not anti-democratic. It gives voice to the losers of the reform process.

What we face in central and eastern Europe is not so much a crisis of democracy, or even of liberalism, but popular antagonism towards the politics of the transition period. In the transition period, postcommunist societies succeeded in peacefully transforming the communist system, building democratic and market institutions, producing economic growth and, finally, in joining the EU. At the same time, the transition led to rapid social stratification that hurt many while privileging a few. Lives were destroyed and hopes betrayed. By the late 1990s, the typical Polish suicide victim was not a teenager in existential crisis, but a married man in his early forties living in one of the myriad small towns and villages where the bankruptcies of farms and state firms combined with the collapse of the old welfare state to produce a particularly searing kind of despair. The fact that the major winners of the transition were the educated and well-connected members of the old nomenklatura did not enhance the moral acceptance of the transition. The original sin of the postcommunist democracies is that they came into being not as an outcome of the triumph of egalitarianism, but as a victory of an anti-egalitarian consensus uniting the communist elite and the anti-communist counter-elite. Ex-communists were anti-egalitarian because of their interests. Liberals were anti-egalitarian because of their ideology. As Jacques Rupnik has put it: "The peaceful transition negotiated in 1989 between ex-dissidents and ex-communists allowed the former to impose their liberal agenda of 'procedural democracy,' while the latter converted to capitalism and 'free enterprise.'"

The impact of EU accession on the consolidation of postcommunist democracies was more ambiguous than some of its advocates are ready to admit. The EU played a key role in securing policy consensus and in improving the quality of institutional performance, as well as in strengthening local democracy and empowering liberal institutions such as the courts and independent central banks. At the same time, however, the EU and the external constraints it imposed contributed to the perception of the transition regimes as "democracies without choices," and thus fuelled the backlash against consensual politics.

Rather than Weimar Germany in 1933, a better analogy for the recent events in central Europe is West Germany in 1968. Today, as in 1968, the crisis came after two decades of economic recovery and a period of amnesia. The turmoil was unexpected and frightening. The crisis in 1968 was rooted not in the failure of democratic institutions but in the success of the postwar West German project of modernisation and democratisation. Then, as today, there was talk about the hollowness of democratic institutions and the need for a moral revolution. In Germany then, as in Poland now, there were appeals for a "new republic" and a rejection of the politics of soulless pragmatism. Then, as now, there was a major transformation in the cultural and geopolitical context, and people demanded more direct democracy.

Here, however, the similarities end. The current revolution is shaped by conservative sensibilities. The new "revolutionaries" in central Europe fear not the authoritarianism of the state but the excesses of postmodern culture and the collapse of traditional values. They are nostalgic, not utopian; defensive, not visionary. In 1968, the spirit of the times was individualistic, emancipatory and libertarian.

Now the challenge to the system comes not from the left but from the right, and the new dream is not global solidarity but national exceptionalism. The populists of 1968 were "educationalists": they wanted to empower the people as they believed the people should be. The populists of today want power for the people as they are. The revolutionaries of 1968 had a passion for "the other," for those who are not like us. The populists of today have a passion for their own community, for those who are just like us. In a sense, the populist revolution that we are witnessing in central Europe today is a revolt against the values, sensibilities and elites of 1968. In the modern age, nothing is more revolutionary than what only yesterday seemed the height of reaction.

Thinking in terms of 1968 tempts us to view the crisis of liberalism in central Europe not as a particular crisis of postcommunist democracies, but as one aspect of the transformation of democracy in the EU as a whole. The heart of the crisis is not a clash of principles pitting democratic majoritarianism as embodied by the populists against liberal constitutionalism as defended by the liberals. It is rather the clash between the liberal rationalism embodied by EU institutions and the populist revolt against the unaccountability of the elites.

Liberal elites fear that modern societies are becoming ungovernable. Populists fear that modern elites have become unaccountable. Both fears are legitimate. The rise of populist parties invites psychological or even psychoanalytical interpretations. Commentators are tempted to analyse populism in terms of "the return of the repressed," "traumas," "frustrations" or "status anxieties." But such talk is misleading. What we are witnessing today is not pathology but a profound transformation in the nature of Europe's liberal democracies. The cold war-era liberal democracies of western Europe, organised around the antagonism between left and right, labour and capital, can no longer serve as a model for central and eastern Europe. In the new environment of a common European market and global economic competition, decision-making on economic policy has practically been excluded from electoral politics. Despite the populist rhetoric, there are few populist policies in central and eastern Europe, especially when it comes to the economy. Populist leaders blame neoliberal policies for the suffering of the people, but do not seem eager to change those policies. The economic approach of the populist governments in Poland or Slovakia has not differed substantially from that of their liberal predecessors.

The political scientist David Ost has argued that the emerging class conflicts in central and eastern Europe became articulated as conflicts not about interests but about identity, thus fostering an illiberal political culture. In order to prevent anti-capitalist mobilisation, liberals successfully excluded anti-capitalist discourse, but in doing so opened up space for political mobilisation around symbolic and identity issues, creating the conditions for their own destruction. The priority given to building capitalism over democracy is at the heart of the rise of democratic illiberalism in the region. The more rational economic policies have become, the more irrational electoral politics has grown. The exclusion of economic policy from the democratic process, combined with the revolution in media and entertainment, eroded the rationalist foundations of liberal policies.

The death of the grand ideological narratives and the hegemony of third-way centrism have profoundly transformed democratic politics. Elections no longer offer a choice between competing worldviews; instead they increasingly take the form of referendums on the elites—and the ritual killing of the governments in power. Scandals have played a central role in this transformation of the political. The populists' obsession with corruption is the most powerful expression of this new understanding of the meaning of politics. The new populist majorities perceive elections not as an opportunity to choose between programmes, but as a revolt against privileged minorities—in the case of central Europe, corrupted elites and morally corrupting "others" such as ethnic or sexual minorities.

Populism is no longer merely a feature of certain parties. It is the new condition of the political in Europe. The result is a brand of politics where the main structural conflict is not between left and right or between reformers and conservatives. The real clash is between elites that are becoming ever more suspicious of democracy and angry publics that are becoming ever more hostile to liberalism.

Adapted from an article published in the "Journal of Democracy" 18:4 (2007) ©National Endowment for Democracy and the Johns Hopkins University Press.