Parties in the Streets: Conservative Movement Politics in Poland and Hungary

Recent political developments in liberal democracies suggest that both political conflicts and actors go through significant transformations. First, old types of societal cleavages are rising (centre/periphery) and merge with new socio-cultural trends (de-globalization). Second, new actors enter the arena of electoral politics; new forms of populism arise, new repertoire is being employed. In our Paper, we aim at both quantitative and relational analysis of the rise of conservative right in Hungary and Poland in order to identify broader mechanisms of its electoral success. In 2010, Fidesz won the majority of seats in the parliamentary elections, and also Jobbik succeeded. In 2015, PiS won the majority of seats in Polish parliamentary elections. First, we aim at analysis of the extra-institutional strategies of these actors before their successful elections (2006-2010 in Hungary, 2011-2015 in Poland). As these parties were intensively engaged in street politics and utilized anti-elitist or anti-establishment claims, we seek to identify to what extent they actually behaved as protest movements and what was the relative intensity of their involvement in protest activities in comparison to other actors (parties, churches, NGOs, etc.). Second, we aim at combining the previous type of analysis with the exploration of interactions of these actors with other organizations and networks in order to show, to what extent they kept their institutionalized character and remained “outside the streets” without further cooperation with other subjects (party) or cooperated with other non-institutional actors (party-through-movement), or whether they rather relied on their own transformation into the movement-style politics without engaging with other networks (party-as-movement), or vice versa (party-with-movement). We also aim at identifying the dynamics of these interactions during the period under study. Our paper is based on a protest event analysis. We use the electronic archives of the Hungarian News Agency Corporation (MTI) and Polish Press Agency (PAP).