ABSTRACT
What we colloquially term as Central and Eastern Europe (the definition of “Central” and “Eastern” being subject to geographic differentiation between countries that consider themselves “Western”) has not escaped the dramatic realignment of our social and political landscapes. In many ways, the political consequences of the social upheavals of the late 2000s and early 2010s have been even more spectacular in the region, as the electoral victories of right-wing leaders such as Viktor Orbán, but also liberal ones such as Zuzana Čaputová have shown over the past few years. These sometimes quite violent political swings are the results of the same social transition as in Western Europe, completed by the experience of the 1990s democratic transition. Indeed, the post-communist party systems, patiently built up by the new (and not-so-new) national elites in the 1990s had remained very fragile. They were therefore impacted more quickly by the 2008 crisis, as shown by the collapse of the Hungarian Left in 2010 (that gave Orbán’s Fidesz a constitutional majority) or that of the Christian-Democratic center-right in Slovakia in the general election of 2012. In each case, the two historic political families never fully recovered, and this contributed to the establishment of spectacular imbalances in the two countries’ political systems.
