Centre-Right Parties in Post-Communist East-Central Europe

Sean Hanley, Aleks Szczerbiak, Seán Hanley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000143201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is the first book to cover the centre-right in post-communist Eastern Europe.

It makes an vital contribution to the broader research agenda on the Central and East European centre-right by focusing on one specific question: why strong and cohesive centre-right formations have developed in some post-communist states, but not others. It also delves into the attempts to develop centre-right parties after 1989 in four nations: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. The authors of these fresh case studies use a common analytical framework to analyse and provide fascinating insights into the varying levels of cohesion in centre-right parties across the region.This volume was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics.

Introduction: Understanding the Politics of the Right in Contemporary East-Central Europe

ALEKS SZCZERBIAK and SEÁN HANLEY

Despite their importance in contemporary European politics, parties of the centre-right remain a strikingly under-researched area in both West European and post-communist Eastern European comparative politics. Compared with the voluminous literature on the left-wing communist successor parties or on the extreme right, little has been written on post-communist centre-right formations in terms of either empirical case studies or attempts to develop explanatory frameworks. The reasons for this paucity of research appear to be both pragmatic, reflecting the personal preferences and interests of individual researchers, and methodological, reflecting intrinsic problems of definition and comparison. Whereas communist successor parties, for example, constitute an easily identifiable bloc, defining who is on the centre-right from amid an array of nationalist, conservative, Christian, liberal and populist groupings is a much more difficult task. As Hanley notes later in this collection, in addition to the vague boundaries between far right and centre-right in the region, liberal and agrarian parties, which have been absorbed into consolidated centre-right blocs in most West European democracies, often appear as small 'centrist' groups in a post-communist context. Further unresolved questions concerning the origins of the post-communist centre-right; its social bases, ideologies and responses to the new challenges of Europeanization and globalization combine to make it a particularly rich, if complex, vein of comparative research that has so far gone largely unaddressed.

The Limits of Historical-Structural Explanation

Most comparative frameworks explaining the emergence of centre-right parties (and parties generally) in post-communist Europe, and national variations among them, stress broad structural and historical factors. The highly influential work of Kitschelt, for example, argues that the incomplete nature of social modernization in pre-communist Hungary and Poland and the coercive nature of their subsequent modernization under communism led to the conservation of populist, ruralist and conservative discourses and debates. These constituted a cultural and ideological reservoir for reconstituting the Right after 1989, but preserved the historical division with liberals committed to free markets and lifestyle pluralism. Lack of social support for communism in such semi-modern societies, Kitschelt argues, created weak 'national-accommodalionist' ruling parties, whose successors initiated and embraced economic reform after 1989, blurring the socio-economic dimension of left-right competition. The free-market, liberal-conservative character of the Czech Right, by contrast, is explained by the pre-communist social modernity of the Czech lands, which left traditional sectors intellectually and socially marginal, but produced an authoritarian 'bureaucratic -authoritarian' form of communism that was averse to any element of market reform. In Bulgaria and Romania, Kitschelt suggests, extremely low levels of pre-communist modernity created clientelistic 'patrimonial communist' ruling parties, able to dominate both the transition from communism in 1989 and the early post-communist period through the use of nationalism and economic populism. Faced with strong ex-communist elites, centre-right groupings in these states therefore fuse pro-market stances with militant anti-communism, in many ways resembling the broad opposition coalitions elsewhere in the region that briefly mobilized against communist regimes in 1989-90, but then fragmented.¹

Milada Anna Vachudová by contrast, plays down the differences identified by Kitschelt between the conservative and neo-liberal centre-right in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, regarding both as 'moderate right'. She attributes the emergence of the 'moderate right' in some states in the region to the existence of strong organized opposition groups under communism, which, she claims, furnished the intellectual basis of such parties and the alternative elites for them. Conversely, she attributes the weakness of the moderate Right in states such as Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia to the weakness of such opposition which, she suggests, allowed former ruling parties or extreme nationalists to appropriate the nationalist discourses of the traditional pre-communist right and emerge as a dominant force.

Such structural-historical analyses paint a broadly convincing picture in explaining patterns of left-right competition across the region. However, they have a number of significant weaknesses. First, they do little to address issues relating to the strength, cohesion and success of centre-right parties in individual states. There has, so far, been relatively little consideration in the literature of why some post-communist centre-right formations are electorally and organizationally more successful than others.² However, what is clear is that the levels of success can often appear anomalous when viewed against a historical backdrop. As Szczerbiak makes clear in this collection, despite the existence of deep-rooted political divisions in Poland dividing a large Catholic-nationalist constituency from secular Poles and a marked urban-rural divide - and despite the short-lived success of Solidarity Election Action in the mid-1990s - centre-right forces have remained organizationally weak and politically divided. In the Czech Republic, by contrast, as Hanley describes, despite the historic strength of the left in the Czech lands and weakness of authoritarian nationalism, political Catholicism and aristocratic conservatism, a powerful and durable neo-liberal 'Thatcherite' centre-right emerged.³ Second, like many accounts of party formation in West European settings, the structural-historical bias of such approaches leads them largely to avoid consideration of the course of post-communist politics. Most contributors to this volume are broadly in sympathy with the aspirations for 'contextualized comparison' that underpin such work - a reaction against both the thick description of some area studies and the 'radical decontextualization' of quantitative methodologies and rational choice approaches that dominate US political science.⁴ However, such work, we would argue, has tended to produce analysis that is too deterministic, broad-brush and static to address key aspects of comparative politics in contemporary Central and Eastern Europe. In the present case, such work has tended to ignore the strategies and interaction of political actors, the uncertainty of outcomes and the problems of political organization, whose effective solution is necessary to translate even the most powerful structural determinant into a concrete result. Even Vachudová's analysis, which relates the type of 'Right' that emerged to more proximate causes, namely the strength of organized opposition under communism and competition from the post-communist left after 1989, ultimately relies upon regime type and regime legacies as the key explanatory variable. However, as Fowler and Szczerbiak note in this collection, even subsequently successful communist successor parties such as those in Hungary and Poland were politically marginal and electorally unpopular in the early 1990s and are themselves arguably still adapting. Indeed, as Fowler notes, despite narrowly losing the 2002 election, Fidesz-Hungarian Civic Alliance (Fidesz-MPSZ) has remained a formidable competitor for power precisely because of its capacity for continued rapid strategic learning, which it has effectively translated into well-disciplined reorganization and realignment. Finally, as contributions to this collection make clear, the power of regime legacies to explain political variation even in broad terms may be rapidly fading. For example, as Haughton and Rybář suggest, the polarized party politics of state building in Slovakia, identified by many as a path-dependent regime legacy, may be a relatively transitory phase in the country's post-communist politics, which may now be giving way to more conventional programmatic competition between left and right.

Bringing Politics Back kin

Arguably, then, the re-emergence of the centre-right in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe can be more fully understood only by considering a range of 'political' factors marginalized or reduced to structural variables in existing comparative analysis. As well as examining legacy-based explanations, and in particular Vachudová's linking of weak communist regime and strong democratic oppositions with the emergence of strong moderate centre-right parties (and vice versa), contributions to this collection have systematically explored a number of propositions stressing 'political' factors:

• that choices made by political actors during the critical junctures of the 1989-91 period could determine the development of strong and cohesive centre-right parties;
• that a less proportional electoral system would produce strong and cohesive centre-right parties (and vice versa);
• that a parliamentary regime would be more likely to produce successful centre-right bloc than a (semi-)presidential system;
• that successful centre-right parties will be formed centrally and institutionalize on the basis of territorial penetration, rather than territorial diffusion; and
• that the presence of ideologically and socially cohesive political elites would lead to the formation of strong and united centre-right parties (and vice versa).

Critical Junctures and Formative Moments

The actions and decisions of political actors at moments of uncertainty and indeterminacy can be seen as shaping patterns of party development for many years to come. In post-communist politics, such critical junctures have often been identified as occurring in and after the period of transition in 1989-90. Grzymala-Busse, for example, while drawing on the structural-historical regime legacies approach developed by Kitschelt and his collaborators, introduces the notion of critical junctures into her work on communist successor parties.⁵ She argues that the organizational, ideological and electoral-strategic choices taken by reform-minded elites in communist successor parties in the key 1989-91 period played a decisive role in determining their future developmental path. However, the extent to which such leaders possessed the know-how to make such choices was, in large part, determined by the legacy of political skills that they inherited from the previous communist regime, a tension between structure and agency never fully resolved. However, the contributions to this volume suggest that in a number of cases unstable patterns of party competition and/or party institutionalization caused critical junctures to occur several years after regime transition and its immediate aftermath.

Institutional Approaches

Institutional approaches stress the importance of the institutional frameworks within which parties emerge and develop as being the key factors determining their strength and cohesiveness, as well highlighting parties' own status as meso-institutions. Macro-institutional factors stress the importance of broader structural-institutional incentives and include factors such as the nature of executive structures, the spatial distribution of power within a state and, in particular, electoral systems. The logic of these approaches is fairly straightforward. For example, a more proportional electoral system will discourage party cohesion because it will encourage political entrepreneurs who find themselves marginalized within their political formation to pursue a strategy of 'exit' rather than 'voice', and vice versa.⁶ Similarly, it has been suggested, a (semi-)presidential system will encourage actors to rise above party politics and thereby undermine party development and institutionalization. According to this approach, a particular post-communist state's broader institutional configuration, particularly the proportionality of its electoral system and whether or not it has a powerful presidency, will determine whether or not it develops cohesive centre-right parties.⁷ However, as a number of the case studies in this collection suggest, post-communist elites have often not behaved rationally in relation to institutions. Moreover, as Fowler's study of the Hungarian right in particular implies, a strong parliamentary regime can be regarded as much an effect of strong political parties as a cause. Finally, as Szczerbiak argues, semi-presidentialism should perhaps be viewed as offering a complex mix of incentives and can in certain circumstances, as in Poland in the mid-1990s, favour party formation by uniting a previously fractured right into a broad electoral coalition.

It is, therefore, also necessary to consider the micro-institutional level of party development. Micro-institutional approaches stress the importance not only of a party's organization and internal power dynamics but also its origins as key variables accounting for whether it can successfully institutionalize itself. A classic statement of this position can be found in the work of Panebianco, who identified the role of external sponsors and patterns of territorial penetration or diffusion as critical determining factors.⁸ Once again, the logic is simple. An organization with a weak institutional power centre and where key leaders owe a higher degree of loyalty to a pre-existing faction or external sponsor rather than the organization as a whole will inevitably be more organizationally brittle. According to this approach, therefore, a successful centre-right party will be formed centrally and develop on the basis of territorial penetration. Such an approach, as Szczerbiak suggests, may explain the puzzling institutional weakness of Poland's Solidarity Election Action - an organization formed by an external trade union sponsor as a loose confederal grouping - which contrasts markedly with the apparent durability of parties created by political entrepreneurs on the Czech and Hungarian centre-right. Such an analysis may bode ill for the newly ascendant Slovak right-wing coalition and its key component, the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKU), whose early disintegrative tendencies are analysed by Haughton and Rybář.

Elite Cohesion and Ideological Construction

Finally, there is the role of elite cohesion and ideological construction. To some extent this overlaps with the theme of critical junctures in stressing the importance of political agency. However, we believe that the origins and internal cohesion of political elites and the broader strategic and ideological visions that political entrepreneurs develop can be regarded as sufficiently distinct to represent a separate variable. The presence or absence of ideologically and socially cohesive political elites, often but not always drawn from the counter-elites outside (or marginal to) the communist party-state during late socialism, appears a critical factor in accounting for the relative success or failure of centre-right parties in post-communist states. Gil Eyal, for example, has traced both the break-up of the Czechoslovak federation in 1992 and the varying patterns of party political development in the Czech Republic and Slovakia after 1992 to the nature of the counter-elites in the Czech lands and Slovakia under late socialism.⁹ However, as this collection suggests, the role of party-forming elites must be seen as comprising more than simply endowment with resources, skills and assets, however broadly conceived. As the country studies by Fowler and Hanley suggest, the relative success of dominant centre-right formations in Hungary and the Czech Republic partly reflects the ability of political entrepreneurs that founded them to craft distinct 'civic' ideologies relating older nationalist or national-populist discourses to current issues in post-communist transformation. Such successful ideological construction - which may also embrace shifts in party ideology -arguably enhances party cohesion and purpose by framing issues into a coherent narrative, thereby facilitating policy choice, intra-party communication, party-voter links and strategic realignments. In both cases, the emergent centre-right benefited ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• INTRODUCTION
• 2. Getting the Right Right: Redefining the Centre-Right in Post-Communist Europe
• 3. Blue Velvet: The Rise and Decline of the New Czech Right
• 4. The Polish Centre-Right's (Last?) Best Hope: The Rise and Fall of Solidarity Electoral Action
• 5. Concentrated Orange: Fidesz and the Remaking of the Hungarian Centre-Right, 1994-2002
• 6. All Right Now? Explaining the Successes and Failures of the Slovak Centre-Right
• 7. What Is the Right Way in East-Central Europe? Concluding Remarks
• Index