The more populism enters public debates, the more it needs close scrutiny. Central and Eastern Europe offers a useful context for exploring the diversity of parties identified as populist. Antiestablishment rhetoric provides a suitable conceptual starting point because of its pervasive role in the region's political discourse. Using a new expert survey, this article details the relationship between antiestablishment salience and political positions, showing that anti-establishment parties occupy a full range across both economic and cultural dimensions and many occupy more centrist positions. Narrowing the focus to content analysis of anti-establishment parties' thin ideology in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, it is concurrently found that for many actors (including those usually labelled as populist) antiestablishment rhetoric is indeed predominant, yet not always extensively combined with other elements of populism: people-centrism and invocation of general will. The findings are important for understanding multiple varieties of anti-establishment politics also beyond the region.

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Particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, but also in "the West," radical right politics established itself in the mainstream and continues to challenge liberal democracy from within.While there is broad consensus that radical right politics in both regions constitute an exclusionary, anti-pluralist counterreaction against societal modernization, the discussion continues whether the radical right in the East remains a contextually distinctive phenomenon sui generis, or rather becomes increasingly similar and "functionally equivalent" to the West.This review synthesizes extant findings on radical right politics from a comparative East-West perspective. Pursuing a "middle path" approach based on the framing perspective, it discusses conceptual synergies behind contextually distinctive and functionally equivalent aspects of radical right politics, expanding these comparative observations towards narrative strategies, mainstreaming mechanisms, and its impact on societies, party systems, policies, and liberal democracy as such.The discussion demonstrates the potential of the framing approach for comparative East-West study of radical right politics. It further shows that not only can concepts developed for WE cases be adapted to inform studies on CEE. Concurrently, contextualized insights from Central and Eastern Europe can provide broader lessons relevant to the study of radical right politics across Europe and in "the West."

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