Communist Successor Parties’ Response to the Rise of the Populist Radical Right in 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 on 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. Academic literature has now largely addressed the impact of the rise of populists on the mainstream right in the region, with the partial exception of the Slovak case; the left has remained largely unexplored. The paper addresses this gap through qualitative case studies and semi-structured interviews with party elites and experts. It examines the Bulgarian Socialist Party and Romania’s Social Democratic Party, which have pursued contrasting strategies of engagement with the populist radical right, with the former adopting a positive approach and the latter a negative one. The paper argues that these divergent responses are shaped by differences in organisational trajectories, programmatic adaptation, international alignments and the extent to which other political actors are willing to deploy a cordon sanitaire around the populist radical right. Most notably, the actors’ position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine emerges as the strongest determinant of the left’s response on a comparative level. The findings are further assessed through two control cases: the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia in the Czech Republic and Slovakia’s Smer-SD.