A decade ago, as elections to the European Parliament approached, the Hungarian right-populist party Jobbik distributed posters picturing Conchita Wurst, a bearded Austrian drag queen who had just won the Eurovision Song Contest, alongside a traditional dirndl-clad blonde woman with a look of determination on her face. “Choose!” commanded the poster. If we add the votes that went to Fidesz, Hungary’s larger right-wing party, to those that went with Jobbik, nearly two-thirds of Hungarians went with the traditional gal over the campy cross-dresser.
Or did they? Maria Snegovaya, a political scientist at George Mason University, argues in this provocative and rigorous book that the formidable strength of right-populism in Eastern Europe since the fall of communism in 1989 is more a product of economics than of culture. And indeed, Jobbik, Fidesz, and other right-wing parties in the region favor more state intervention in national economies—transfer payments, trade protection, limited immigration, and other policies once associated with the political left.
Most analysts agree that populism is, in general, a political movement that purports to take the side of “real” citizens against putative impostors, outsiders, and subversives. A marginal phenomenon in the Western democracies a quarter century ago, it now controls prominent political parties on the right and left alike, across the globe. Its politicians govern a number of countries and are bidding to govern more. For those who reject it, populism is a clear threat to democracy. For populists themselves, it is democracy’s salvation.
But what causes it? Snegovaya sets herself against a group of social scientists and journalists who have argued that at least its right-wing version is a reaction against the post-1960s values of the political center and left. (Left-wing populism is a force, too, particularly in southern Europe and now in France.) In the words of political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, these “authoritarian-populists” embrace “intolerance, racism, homophobia, misogyny, and xenophobia.” Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts the matter more sympathetically: Populists, like most people throughout history, adhere to a full-spectrum morality that includes loyalty, authority, and reciprocity; it is modern secularists who are strange. In any case, Snegovaya acknowledges that cultural differences are at play in populism. But the truth is, she writes, that parties of the right went populist years ago to capture economically vulnerable voters which parties of the left had abandoned.