Economic Reforms, Party System (In)Stability, and Populism: Has the East Become the South?

The recent populist turn towards nationalism and economic internventionism in post-communist Europe invites comparisons with Latin America’s well-known populist models. Drawing on – and elaborating - recent work on Latin America (Roberts 2015), this paper proposes a critical juncture approach in order to explain variation in post-communist party systemic in/stability as well as the rise of populist parties, such as Hungary’s Fidesz, Poland’s PiS, and Slovakia’s SMER, that have embraced nationalist and economically interventionist populism. The approach focuses on the political dynamics between reformers and opposition at key moments in the implementation of market reforms. It suggests that where liberal parties were the major economic reformers in the 1990s, with a coherent parliamentary opposition from the Left, party systems became programmatically more aligned and relatively more stable. Alternatively and counter-intuitively, where leftist or populist actors implemented major economic reforms, while the opposition was from the Right, party systems became programmatically more de-aligned, usually more unstable, and open to populist takeover. It is proposed that despite the differences, major similarities of the post-communist transition to that of Latin America underscore common dynamics in processes of marketization and democratization.