Nostalgia as a strategy of the populist radical right : Sucess, Failure, and Democratic Impact in Post-Socialist Europe

Authoritarian nostalgia’s reconstruction in different national contexts is shaped by both historical legacies and current geopolitical events. The war in Ukraine has heightened tensions between democratic values and authoritarianism, particularly in post-socialist societies that have yet to fully reconcile with their communist past. While radical right parties have long been present in Central and Eastern Europe, the strategic instrumentalization of nostalgia poses a significant challenge to liberal democratic principles, exacerbated by high levels of disinformation, declining voter turnout, and low civic literacy. This paper uses a comparative approach to investigate the discursive mechanisms and policy entrepreneurshipemployed by radical right parties and politicians in Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Poland to transform nostalgia into electoral success. Focusing on electoral campaigns, it explores the conditions under which authoritarian nostalgia succeeds or fails as a political strategy. The study also draws on data from the 2023 Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES Ukraine) to analyze the polarization of political parties on the Ukraine war, alongside national and regional surveys capturing individual-level values and attitudes toward the past. Additionally, the paper examines the link between nostalgic appeals to an authoritarian past and exclusionary, ethnocentric policies, assessing their broader impact on democratic governance in post-socialist European states. This research contributes to understanding how radical right actors use nostalgia to erode pluralism and minority rights as part of a wider anti-liberal democratic discourse