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.
Her case goes like this. After the annus mirabilis of 1989, when a chain of popular revolutions toppled their communist regimes, most Eastern Europeans wanted to join the West, that is to say primarily the increasingly dense web of international institutions soon to rename itself the European Union. The EU offered prosperity, opportunity, stability, and consumer goods that the old communist regimes could never provide. In 1993, as knocks on its Eastern door grew louder, the EU announced criteria for membership that included market-based economies, the rule of law, and adoption of the body of EU law that had accumulated since the 1950s, including the free movement across national borders of goods, services, money, and people.
In the former Soviet bloc countries, the old communist parties endured, but now they had to compete with other political parties for power. Over the course of the 1990s, most responded by becoming pro-EU and hence, to various degrees, pro-reform or “neoliberal.” The state, they declared, had to withdraw from the commercial realm—not completely, to be sure, but more than any communist party had ever allowed. Parties of the left began to look like parties of the right. The move worked, as the EU agreed to begin the long process of accession beginning with Snegovaya’s four countries—Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic—plus the three small Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
But then came a problem that former EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker put succinctly: “We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.” Economic reform proved unpopular in Europe, particularly among working-class voters, as it traded the job security and wage supports that they had taken for granted for economic growth. And as Snegovaya shows, factory and mine workers were especially prominent in Eastern Europe. It takes little imagination to see the opportunity that this opening presented to the new parties of the right: Fill the gap left by the left by becoming champions of the welfare state.
It worked. Fidesz and Jobbik in Hungary, Law and Justice (PiS) in Poland, SPR-RSČ in Czechia, and Smer-SD in Slovakia, rightist parties all, thrived under entrepreneurial leaders who knew how to push on an open door. The left abandoned workers and the right welcomed them.
Snegovaya backs up her story with state-of-the-art social science. She shows that, in these four countries, the more free-market-oriented the leftist party, the less popular it is, especially among the working class, and the more popular are the right-populists. Mindful that correlation does not necessarily mean causation, Snegovaya presents case studies showing that as leftist parties moved right, economically vulnerable voters abandoned them and moved to right-wing parties that were discovering the virtues of state intervention in the economy. Czechia provides a partial exception. There the old left-wing KSČM retained much of its commitment to worker welfare and did not suffer such great losses; as a result, the right-wing SPR-RSČ had less opportunity and less success. Snegovaya also conducted survey experiments of actual voters prior to the European Parliament elections of 2018. She found working-class voters particularly prone to say they would vote for right over left if right were more committed to social protection.
That was only when Snegovaya asked about transfer or welfare payments. When she asked about immigration policy—whether voters would lean right if the right were anti-immigration and the left were pro-immigration—the results were null. Snegovaya concludes that money, more than culture, is driving populism.
If she is correct, then people who worry about populism can breathe easy and simply move parties of the left back to the left. No need to worry about Conchita Wurst or neo-pagan Olympic opening ceremonies or wokeness. Just start favoring labor over capital again. Indeed, that was the gamble that the Biden administration made and the advice that Snegovaya herself offers to left-wing parties.
But must we—should we—distinguish culture and economics so sharply? One curious move Snegovaya makes is to treat immigration as a cultural rather than an economic issue. Surely it is both: Migrants coming into a country can not only add new norms to a neighborhood or town but also increase the supply of labor and lower wage growth. That is why parties of the left, and politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, used to oppose high immigration.
The entanglement of culture and economics extends beyond immigration, however. Snegovaya smartly follows age-old convention by acknowledging that people with similar levels of wealth and types of jobs form classes. As writers such as Michael Lind and Thomas Frank have reminded us, classes are also cultural things. One sign that the Republican Party is now a working-class party is that the final night of its 2024 convention gave the stage to a retired professional wrestling champion, a “country-rap” star, and the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship—in addition to Donald Trump himself, who inherited a fortune but is past master at impersonating a working-class guy.
If culture is separable from, and secondary to, economics, we must ask why parties of the right embraced a culture they once disdained; why they are holding so much of the working class despite not necessarily serving their economic interests; why parties of the left still have trouble when they move back to the left on economics but cling to their post-1960s cultural norms. And we must ask why, after all this time, in country after country, those parties still cannot see the problem.