Central and Eastern European Economic Populism in the Era of Crisis

The actual economic crisis has stimulated the emergence of a series of populist platforms, which speculated in a pitiless way the increasing difficulties in order to gain public support. Far from being new or unexpected, this phenomenon is however peculiar at least in that it seems to include not only various types of populist promises expressed by actors being in the opposition, but also with a neophyte ‘rigorist-populist’ discourse coming from the (overwhelmingly) right-wing parties in power. Associated to some more or less effective macro-economic policies, these discourses combine anti-elitism based on severe cuts of expenses in fields such as culture, sports, education or health with the idealization of popular virtues, such as simplicity, authenticity and good sense of common people. In this paper, I would try to analyze how such discourses are combined with pro-active or repressive economic measures in a way that they have the capacity to sustain the ‘perenialization’ of the political forces that produce them.