In the Name of the Peasantry, the Proletariat, and the People:Populisms in Eastern Europe

Abstract

In the last decade, many scholars have proclaimed the re-emergence of populism in European politics. In Western Europe the term is generally used to denote postmodern or ‘more moderate’ types of ‘Extreme Right’ or ‘Radical Right’ parties, but in Eastern Europe it is considered to be a more general phenomenon, spread across the ideological spectrum.1 Like nationalism, populism has become a catchword for both the western media and the academic community that deal, often only in passing, with the post-communist East. For example, as early as 1990 Time ran a story under the title ‘Populism on the March’ (Walsh 1990), while seven years later the journal Communist and Post-Communist Studies published an article entitled ‘Slovakia and the Triumph of Nationalist Populism’ (Carpenter 1997).