Gianmarco Bucci1; 1 Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy
Discussion
The electoral success of the populist radical right has posed a significant challenge to the mainstream left over the past few decades. While studies focusing on the Western European context do not necessarily agree on the correlation between the left's crisis and the radical right's success, a nexus between the two seems to be more consistent in Central and Eastern Europe, where the liberal turn of several communist successor parties is thought to have been the leading cause behind the success of illiberal and populist right-wing parties. Drawing on qualitative case studies and semi-structured interviews to party elites and experts, the paper shows that the Bulgarian Socialist Party and Romania's Social Democratic Party have adopted, respectively, a positive and negative strategy of engagement vis-à-vis the populist radical after 2020. Such divergence is determined by the socialists’ organisational and programmatic evolution, their international positioning (most notably in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and the willingness of other parties to isolate the populist radical right. The paper offers a particular insight into the internal dynamics of the two communist successor parties, trapped in the choice of whether to accomodate the radical right's agenda.
