Populist radical right mainstreaming and challenges to democracy in an enlarged Europe

Radical right politics in East and West: Distinctive yet equivalent

“…Observations of long shadows cast over CEE democracies by (pre‐)Leninist legacies, as well as post‐1989 “dilemma of simultaneity” (Offe, ) of parallel nation‐building processes and economic reforms offered a pessimistic forecast for the region (for a critical discussion, see i.a. Pytlas, , ; Mudde, ). CEE is thus often deemed as a region that can offer little comparative insights vis‐à‐vis RR politics in established, post‐industrial democracies of Western Europe (WE).…”

“…On the other hand, in some cases, RR politics were not co‐opted by mainstream competitors “merely” on short‐term basis, but with time became comprehensively internalized by conventional mainstream parties such as Fidesz in Hungary, or Law and Justice (PiS) in Poland (cf. Mudde, ; Pytlas, ). The fact that “radical right politics are not limited to radical right parties ” (Mudde, , p. 48) makes conceptual and empirical analyses both within CEE and across regions an even more challenging task (cf.…”

“…The study of the RR in CEE only recently generated a second wave of more overarching comparative studies (Minkenberg, ; Minkenberg, , ; Minkenberg & Pytlas, ; Pirro, , ; Pytlas, , , ; Pytlas & Kossack, ) that build up on the foundations laid out by classical research (Minkenberg, ; Mudde, , , ; Ramet, ).…”

“…This progress was due to the realization that RR politics in the East is not a mere revival of inter‐war fascist currents, but a modern and contemporary counter‐reaction to processes of societal modernization (Mudde, , p. 44; Minkenberg, , p. 355), understood as processes of growing individual autonomy and increasing functional differentiation of societies (Rucht, ; Minkenberg, , p. 174). Nonetheless, cross‐regional research on radical right politics in West and East—particularly studies that draw synergies between both regions to reach broader comparative conclusions—still remains in the starting blocks (but see, among others, Mudde, ; Minkenberg, , ; Pytlas, ). One reason is that the literature still discusses the contemporary imprint of specific historical legacies and—respectively—post‐Communist or post‐industrial modernization processes on the development of RR politics in both regions.…”

“…Studies that analysed radical right politics from a framing perspective (Pytlas, , ) seem to follow a middle path, attempting to draw conceptual synergies from the particular foci of both aforementioned approaches. The framing approach not only focuses on actors and their substantive issue supply but also expands the optic towards functional narrative “packaging” of specific contexts and issues by both RR parties and their mainstream competitors.…”