The Conservative Social Democracy: Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe

The electoral rise of the populist radical right has increasingly challenged mainstream left-wing parties over recent decades. While existing scholarship has not reached a consensus over the drivers of voter realignment from the left to the radical right in Western Europe, the relationship between the decline of the left and the success of right-wing populism is well established in Central and Eastern Europe. The paper addresses this issue by looking at the programmatic reconfiguration of the mainstream left as a response to the electoral success of the populist radical right in Romania and Bulgaria. Through qualitative case studies and semi-structured interviews with party elites and experts, the paper shows that the Bulgarian Socialist Party and Romania’s Social Democratic Party have increasingly co-opted the far-right agenda to counter the new competitor. The paper furthermore sheds light on the innovative concept of "conservative social democracy" that resulted from the recent repositioning of the left. It backs recent contribution on the emergence of a conservative or illiberal view of the left in the region, arguing that efforts to innovate theoretically the concept are indeed being made across Central and Eastern Europe.