Multiple Varieties of Populism in Central and Eastern Europe

The more populism enters public debates the more it needs close scrutiny. Central and Eastern Europe offers a perfect context for exploring the diversity of parties identified as populist; anti-establishment sentiment provides a useful conceptual starting point because of its pervasive role in that region’s political discourse. Using a new expert survey, this article details the relationship between anti-establishment salience and political positions, showing that while anti-establishment parties occupy a full range across both economic and cultural dimensions, many others occupy centrist positions. Narrowing the focus to content analysis of anti-establishment parties’ thin ideology in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, we concurrently find that for many actors (including those usually labeled as populist) anti-establishment 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.