ABSTRACT
Democracies in Central Eastern Europe continuously struggle against the upsurge of radical right political parties and movements. Not only the rise of Jobbik in the late 2000s, but also the almost uninterrupted representation of the SNS in the post-1989 Slovak Parliament or the former government participation of the LPR, together with the current revival of the National Movement in Poland, contribute to this assertion. Still, scholarly research on this topic has hitherto focused mostly on the radical right parties’ electoral performance and agenda, largely omitting their influence at the levels of agenda-setting, policymaking, or the party system. This chapter aims to tackle some of these shortcomings and to provide impulses for future works on the political impact of the radical right in Central and Eastern Europe. Departing from empirical observations of party competition between radical right parties and their mainstream competitors along the socio-cultural cleavage, this contribution seeks to shed light on the influence of these parties on positional shifts – disseminated into spatial and narrative ones – within the party systems in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. In order to examine this aspect of radical right impact, a two-step model shall be applied. First, an evaluation of expert survey data will be carried out to identify positional shifts in the field of identity politics. Second, qualitative observations of political competition on country-specific issues will be used to shed light on the mechanisms, timing, and extent of these shifts. Based on these data, it shall be argued that a viable threat of a radical right party will lead to either a rightward shift in the party system as a whole or to increasing polarization between a left and a right camp, while the nearby competitors of the radical right always shift toward the right following a strategy of issue and frame co-optation. Furthermore, the decline of radical right parties is accompanied by a convergence of the mainstream parties.
