engleski

Centrist Populisms of Central and Eastern Europe:New Challengers for Domestic Elites as Well as for Brussels Elites?

The EU has often been labeled as a 'centrist project', as well as an ‘elite-driven project’, which makes it a target of populist actors over the political spectrum, sometimes including those near the center. The bulkof research on those actors has, however, focused on radical populist parties rather than centrist populist parties and their attitudes towards the EU. The latter types of parties have made a significant impact on politics in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly during the previous decade. This paper therefore seeks to explore centrist populist parties' attitudes towards the EU during the 2010s. The paper is divided into two parts: the supply and demand side of populism. On the supply side, the main research question is what sort of attitudes towards the EU centrist populist parties hold. Case selection is based on two criteria: the party must still be active and must have provided the prime minister. The PopuList database was used to filter out populist parties, with EU attitudes explored through CMP and EU Profiler/euandi scores onEU issues. The cases of SMER, OĽaNO, ANO, List of Marjan Šarec and GERB are analyzed. The analysis is complemented by qualitative accounts based on party manifestos and otherrelevant party publications. The demand side was explored through 2018 European Social Survey (ESS) data, which allows ascertaining EU attitudes of the parties’ voters, as well as general views of the EU in the researched countries. In conclusion, the paper shows that none of the five cases display hard Euroscepticism yet Czechia in general and ANO in particular show the most Eurosceptic positions, while the Bulgarian GERB party expressed strong and sustained pro-EUstances.

centrist populist parties ; populism ; Euroscepticism ; Central and Eastern Europe

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