It has been more than 15 years since the first eight formerly communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe entered the European Union. Today, the so-called Eastern enlargement has expanded the number of EU members by eleven, which means that the number of empirical cases of elections to the European Parliament has also increased. For the countries that entered in 2004 or in 2007, the 2019 European Parliament (EP) elections will be the fourth in a row; Croatia has voted only three times since the country entered the EU in 2013.
The question might emerge as to why compare only among the ‘new’ EU members with a post-communist background. Does the East-West ‘cleavage’ as a specific version of the centre-periphery cleavage, reinforced by cultural differences (Heidar 2003: 13–15) in European politics, still apply? What is the merit of looking at only one cross-section of EU countries? Besides the practical issues related to doing the necessary research and orchestrating the collective of authors for a collaborative work such as this, there are strong arguments for the view that a study dedicated to the Central Eastern European (CEE) countries still matters.
Even a casual look at Czechia, Hungary or Poland, for example, will confirm for an observer of CEE politics that these countries remain specific. The CEE governments often adopt a rather critical approach to various important EU policies and activities, such as the Euro currency and migration. Even the CEE member states (MS) participating in the Eurozone are still the net receivers of EU funds, which shape their policy preferences at the EU level as well as domestic ‘European’ debates. Public opinion towards the EU and its important policy areas differs in the ‘old’ MS compared to the ‘new’ MS from Central and Eastern Europe (Dostál 2011), as does the very perception of the EU and European identity (Ilonszki 2010). The majority of CEE countries have faced swift and profound changes in their party systems, which some authors have labelled ‘hurricane season’ (Haughton and Degan Krause 2015). The lower level of stability of political actors makes these countries more vulnerable both in terms of contestation concerning the quality and efficiency of democracy and in terms of contesting membership in the EU or participation in some EU policies. The CEE countries are demonstrating, in contrast to Western European Member states, the so-called democratic backsliding. And despite profound Europeanisation in some countries (Havlík et al. 2017), Euroscepticism has generally become bolder in the party systems of the ‘new’ member states and it still bears many idiosyncratic features to be demonstrated and analysed in the context of the European elections campaigns.
The ‘democratic backsliding’ that has brought on neo-authoritarian politics (Greskovits 2015), in particular, as well as the rise of illiberal and protest politics in many ‘new’ member countries of the EU, in general, are two current arguments for the special attention we must pay to this region. Both challengers of ‘Western’ liberalism, like Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński, and the challengers of established political elites, like Andrej Babiš, typically use anti-EU appeals to attract voters dissatisfied with the performance of national political institutions and who are prone to accept explanations based on allegedly adversarial policies imposed on the CEE countries by ‘Brussels’ (Ágh 2018; Schlipphak and Treib 2017).
The illiberal democratic turn in Central and Eastern European politics increases rifts in the EU itself, as the diverging stances on European migration policies for example show. It does not apply to ‘sectoral’ policies only. The increasing illiberalism among the CEE member states even undermines the power capacity of the EU as an actor in international relations (Meunier and Vachudova 2018: 1639–1643). Some authors (Hooghe and Marks 2018) argue that the Euro crisis in combination with the migration crisis has already demonstrated a potential to create a strong transnational cleavage in European party politics. As Hooghe and Marks (2018: 123) remind, ‘[e]very country in Europe has been deeply affected by the political fallout of the crises, but the way in which party systems have responded varies widely’. However, the response of CEE party systems has been different compared to that in both Western and Southern Europe. In the former case, far-right parties have capitalised on the votes coming from the losers in these crises; in the latter case, the radical left parties took the role of advocates of the losers. We will examine the strong presence and persistence of far-right rhetoric and politics within the ‘new’ member states and their impact on the European elections in 2019.
The possible emergence of new transnational cleavages used by the far-right parties relates to the second major concern of this volume. That is analysis of the recent scope and trends of Euroscepticism in Central and Eastern Europe. Scholarly literature on the multi-speed Europe or differentiated integration (see Schimmelfennig et al. 2015 for a comprehensive account of the debate) stresses some areas of this, which are of prominent importance for Central and Eastern Eurosceptic discourse. Although some ‘new’ member countries are closer to the ‘core’ of the EU (typically through membership in the Eurozone), the ‘lower speed’ prevails in the region, be it in respect to the countries outside the Schengen Area, or outside the Eurozone etc. There is a link, which we will examine closer in our country chapters, between the specificities of Central and Eastern European Euroscepticism and the continuing East-West divergence in the EU. The diversity is manifested in such policy areas as migration policy, discussion on the priorities of the new financial framework, as well as basic discussions on the general values of the EU and their applicability, the last one especially concerning the triggering of Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU). Euroscepticism, envisaged by some authors to foster populism inside the EU political debate (Mudde 2005), has reshaped the centre-periphery cleavages in Central and Eastern member states in a substantial way and replaced post-communist rhetoric with new EU-rejecting, or at least questioning, party positions (Pisciotta 2016).
This information alone provides sufficient cause to analyse and compare the 2019 EP elections, the campaigns, the parties, the manifestos and, of course, the results among these eleven CEE Member states of the EU. In this analysis we intend to follow the contributions of scholars who have covered previous rounds of EP elections in the Eastern part of the EU and placed them within a general, EU-wide perspective (Lodge 2010; Schmitt 2010; Schmitt and Teperoglu 2016; Viola 2016; Holtz-Bacha et al. 2017). There are books covering Euroscepticism in Central and Eastern Europe (Rulikova 2010; Fuchs et al. 2009; Havlík et al. 2017) that can be updated and augmented by our research. Our analysis therefore focuses on the features of the EP elections derived from the concept of second-order elections (SOE ; see Golder et al. 2017; Hassing Nielsen and Franklin 2017) and we examine to what extent and in what particular features this still holds true in the set of countries that, typically, show far lower electoral turnout for EP elections (Cabada and Hloušek 2009) than the Western European ‘club’ of older members. We also intend to demonstrate the continuing trend of higher party-electoral volatility compared to the original EU-15 (Cabada et al. 2014).
This is, however, only the secondary aim of our study, as we would like primarily to place the EP elections 2019 in Central and Eastern Europe and their outcomes into the context of party Euroscepticism, which has been reinforced and fed in the recent period mainly by the Eurozone and migration crises (Taggart and Szczerbiak 2018). The EP elections have been a very useful window of opportunity for the voicing of both soft and hard Eurosceptic stances and positions widely taken by different Eurosceptic parties across the EU. The main aim of this book is therefore to describe, analyse and compare the positions and performance of Eurosceptic parties in the eastern part of the EU.
We would particularly like to find out whether soft and hard positions represent specific degrees of the same phenomenon—that is, Euroscepticism—or whether each of them stands for a distinctive approach towards the EU. The reality of Central and Eastern European party politics and the way the parties treat EU issues reveals that the most typical example of soft Eurosceptic behaviour is not consistent with a general notion of the need for profound reform of the EU as a polity. Sometimes, the parties criticise some specific policies such as migration policy or the budgetary policy of the EU. Sometimes, the criticism addresses just one of the EU institutions, most typically the European Commission. We cannot generalise, however, about the prevailing ‘targets’ of soft Eurosceptic parties and politicians since there are still many national idiosyncrasies we must explore before we try to take a comparative look at what it means in praxis to be a Central European soft Eurosceptic politician.
The structure of the book corresponds to this aim. First, the introductory chapter presents and operationalises concepts that the authors use in the analysis of the country studies. This includes the theory of second-order Elections and Euroscepticism, as well as Europeanisation, which is a process that has affected not only the pro-European parties, but that also transforms, as we will show, the rhetoric, arguments, tactics and strategies of Eurosceptic actors as well.
After the introduction, eleven country chapters follow. They cover all countries that have acceded to the EU since 2004, in alphabetical order, and which also had belonged to the communist USSR-dominated bloc in Europe during the second half of the twentieth century. This means the inclusion of Bulgaria (written by Dragomir Stoyanov and Plamen Ralchev), Croatia (Goran Čular and Marijana Grbeša), Czechia (Vít Hloušek and Petr Kaniok), Estonia (Piret Ehin, Tõnis Saarts and Mari-Liis Jakobson), Hungary (Krisztina Arató), Latvia (Daunis Auers), Lithuania (Liutauras Gudžinskas and Tomas Bekišas), Poland (Aleks Szczerbiak), Romania (Sorina Soare and Claudiu Tufis), Slovakia (Marek Rybář) and Slovenia (Alenka Krašovec and Damjan Lajh). All the country chapters are written by local experts who have extensive research experience in European and party politics and who therefore can couple the highest academic standards...