Social Dialogue at the Central Level in States Governed by Populist Political Parties: The Cases of Poland and Hungary

Social dialogue, understood as a process of negotiation, consultation and exchange of information among the government, trade unions and employers’ organizations, occurs in every modern democratic country. Still, there is a number of controversies involved in social dialogue. The paper examines whether the populist governments in Hungary (2010-2014) and Poland (2015-2017) exerted an influence on the quality of social dialogue at the central level. For the purpose of the paper I will compare the effectiveness of social dialogue in Hungary and Poland during the populist parties’ rule with its effectiveness in the period when previous, non-populist governments were at the helm of the governments in these countries (in Hungary between 2006-2010 and in Poland between 2011-2015). The paper will explore whether the condition of social dialogue in Hungary and in Poland was similar during the terms of non-populist and populist governments. I hypothesize that in both cases social dialogue was rather ineffective and might not have led to solution of any major socio-economic problems these countries struggled with. The reason for that is that the Hungarian and Polish populist and non-populist governments treated social partners instrumentally. During the tripartite negotiations, these governments refused to make any significant concessions to trade unions and employers’ organizations. They just sought their acceptance for the political decisions that in fact they made autonomously. Thus, trade unions and employers’ organizations were solely legitimizing the government’s policies through participation in the sessions of the tripartite bodies. On the other hand, a bulk of the actions undertaken by social partners outside of the tripartite bodies (such as strikes or demonstrations) ended unsuccessfully, because these organizations were too weak (due to their political resources of low quality) to make the government comply with the expectations of social partners.