What Is Fueling Populism In Former Warsaw Pact Countries Like Romania

With European new-right parties making such alarming electoral advances, on top of those already in power from Hungary to Georgia to Slovakia, it’s time to understand the phenomenon dispassionately. Having spent some years intermittently covering former Warsaw Pact countries as a journalist for various publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Politico Europe, and the like including cover stories for Newsweek, I got to know the political landscape from 2006 onwards. .

A number of factors stood out among populist movements that critics never quite grasped. They apply to this day. Most recently, such parties have gained momentum in UK and German local elections, and most astonishingly in Romania where rank outsider, George Simion, recently won the first round of Presidential elections. The UK to one side, the former Warsaw Pact often housed populations that resented Moscow’s dominance during the Soviet years. They greeted the West’s Cold War victory with open arms. They now seem to be reversing the course of history by rejecting those realignments, especially towards Europe, that they embraced so passionately just a few decades ago. What is provoking a backlash so fierce that country after country forgets its 20th century experience and threatens to succumb while the one-time mainstream seems incapable of responding?

First a little crucial history that commentators seem universally to overlook. A large swatch of Eastern and Central Europe was dominated or threatened by the Ottoman Empire for centuries. Including Romania, and for a while, Hungary. Some became part of the Hapsburg empire. That collapsed and they had a moment of independence, then came the Nazis, and soon afterwards they were forced into the Warsaw Pact post-WWII. They never got to enjoy a fully independent state based on their national group and language. One shouldn’t forget that the original appeal of the nation-state idea either side of 1900 was precisely that it promised a liberation from empires and their ills, unwieldy governance controlled from afar, linguistic confusion, ethnic strife and tribalism.

In effect, it promised a country with a national identity, the kind that is derided these days as an ethno-state, racist, and elitist. In fact, for centuries, their inhabitants had been forced instead to enjoy what the same deriders consider virtues these days, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious systems. Having finally thrown off the dominance of large systems and empires after the Soviet collapse, these countries were at first happy to join a voluntary alliance of nation-states as offered by the West and Europe.

Trouble is, they soon found themselves enmeshed in new super-systems that they felt overrode their national habits. Systems such as the EU or financial globalism in which, let’s say, your national grid is partly owned by a Gulf state or faraway shareholders. One could, with some justification, argue that the grid might be better run thereby, or that local owners such as oligarchs could be more corrupt and less transparent, controlled more by political influence than the urge to efficiency. Nevertheless, for geographies that yearn for self-rule because they’ve been denied it so long, nationalism has a strong appeal – which includes strong borders as part of national sovereignty. Ironically, in Europe these are often less wealthy countries least threatened by migrant surges such as Hungary, Romania and Georgia. Even way back in a September 2012 Newsweek article about the upcoming national elections in Georgia, I noticed that populists warned of Georgian identity being undermined and that Tbilisi was full of foreigners – a manifestly non-factual statement at the time and since.

Clearly we are not witnessing a phenomenon that exists only in former Warsaw Pact zones. Indeed, at this point populist political momentum spans the globe including countries like Turkey and the Philippines. Yet each country seems to think the phenomenon is purely their own, homegrown, authentic, specific to them, however international the reality. No Brit would think to compare Nigel Farage with Le Pen of France or indeed the Afd of Germany or Erdogan of Türkiye. Yet it encompasses a widespread sentiment at this point. What makes it different for Warsaw pact countries is that they were so delighted to escape Moscow’s grip and burst free toward the West during the 1990s. They had finally busted out. So it seems shocking to see them repudiate so soon such a huge historic groundswell of feeling at the time.

What western commentators don’t seem to understand is that the populations enthusiastic for populist candidates are adhering, in their minds, to the same principle of embracing national identity as they did when they broke free of socialist internationalism, as it was called then. Only this time, they see Moscow as embodying that principle of nationalism which was such anathema to Soviet ideology.