Why Populism Keeps Winning in Central and Eastern Europe: New Research Traces the Causes

Populism has moved from the margins of political science to the center of the discipline over the past two decades, and nowhere is this shift more visible than in Central and Eastern Europe. A new editorial published in Frontiers in Political Science by Ildiko Otova and Evelina Staykova of New Bulgarian University brings together a collection of studies that examine why populist parties, movements, and discourses have taken root so deeply across the region, and what their normalization means for the quality of democracy. The editorial frames a Research Topic that spans Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland, and it arrives at a conclusion that challenges both popular and academic assumptions: the region’s history does not automatically produce populism, but it supplies the raw material that political entrepreneurs can activate.

The editors begin by situating populism within the major theoretical approaches that have dominated the field. Scholars have variously treated populism as a thin ideology, as a discursive style that divides society into a pure people and a corrupt elite, as a political strategy employed by charismatic leaders, and as a performative political style communicated through media and spectacle. Yet, as Otova and Staykova argue, no single model can fully account for the manifestations of populism in Central and Eastern Europe. The region’s political development has been shaped by diverse nation-building processes, a shared but specific legacy of authoritarianism and communism, the turbulence of democratic transition, the demands of European integration, and persistent geopolitical pressures. These conditions are significant, the editorial insists, but they are not automatic causes. They acquire political significance only through processes of agency, articulation, and institutionalization.

One of the central methodological contributions comes from a study of Romania that criticizes the field’s tendency to treat populism as a purely contemporary phenomenon. The author introduces the concept of populist configurations, a framework that situates conditions, institutions, actors, and events within a single analytical structure and across historical time. This approach is particularly suited to Central and Eastern Europe, where state formation, contested sovereignty, external domination, and successive regime transformations have repeatedly reshaped the political landscape. Using the Romanian case, the study constructs a typology, a timeline, and an illustrative example of a populist anti-Semitism configuration, demonstrating how historical grievances and exclusionary narratives can be reactivated and repackaged by modern political actors. The aim is not to identify a single historical trajectory but to replace ahistorical explanations with a comparative and configurational approach that accounts for the diversity, persistence, and transformation of populism both within the region and beyond it.

A second Romanian study shifts the analytical lens from history to contemporary political communication, examining media coverage of protests and parliamentary debates between 2020 and 2024. Rather than assuming a straightforward cause-and-effect relationship between street mobilization and parliamentary populism, the researchers analyzed elements such as people-centredness, anti-elitism, exclusionary othering, claims of sovereignty, and crisis framing across both civic and institutional spheres. The findings are striking: there is no consistent pattern of populist themes spreading from protests to parliament or vice versa. Instead, the study reveals a pattern the authors call parallel politicisation. Parliamentary discourse discusses populist themes in a stable and routine manner, while protest communication is irregular, fragmented, and heavily dependent on specific events. The limited temporal and semantic connection between these arenas suggests that populist politicization can persist independently of continuous transmission between civic and institutional spaces.

This finding carries significant implications for how scholars and policymakers understand the resilience of populist discourse. If populism becomes embedded in the routine communication practices of political institutions, it can survive and even flourish even when civic mobilization is sporadic. The study challenges simple supply-side models, which locate the engine of populism in opportunistic elites, and demand-side models, which attribute it to grievances among voters. Both models, the evidence suggests, are incomplete. Routine political communication itself plays a crucial role in maintaining populist framing, meaning that the normalization of populist language can proceed quietly within parliaments regardless of what happens in the streets.

The Bulgarian case, analyzed by the editors themselves, addresses the question of normalization directly. Their analysis argues that since 2001, populist ideas and practices have become enduring features of the Bulgarian political system rather than episodic disruptions. The proposed typology distinguishes between anti-elitist and nationalist orientations, and between analog and digital forms of populist communication. Migration narratives emerge as one key mechanism through which normalization unfolds. Crucially, the analysis shows that crisis cannot be reduced to demographic scale alone; it is politically and discursively produced. Through what the authors describe as the politics of fear, migration is constructed as an existential threat, while the people are elevated to the status of a morally privileged object of protection. This form of radical demophilia, a politics that claims to speak for and protect the authentic people, can legitimize exclusionary policies and erode liberal norms, all while wrapping itself in the language of democratic care.

Hungary offers a related but distinct perspective on threat construction through the concept of the imported enemy. The 2015 migration crisis, often cited as the turning point that propelled right-wing populism to dominance in the country, is reframed here as less a primary cause and more a catalyst that triggered pre-existing identity-related anxieties amid an already normalized hostility. The study demonstrates how a marginalized or numerically rare group can become a powerful object of fear when state discourse, legal measures, media campaigns, and normative prejudices converge to transform it into a symbol of cultural danger, loss of sovereignty, and national vulnerability. Long-standing anti-Roma prejudices are significant in this regard, forming part of an established pattern of exclusion that predates the migration debate. Once such mechanisms are institutionalized, they can normalize exclusion and cement the boundaries of belonging and citizenship within a moralized understanding of us and them.

The Polish case, examined through the lens of Brexit, provides an original analytical framework for assessing the likelihood of a populist-led exit from the European Union in other member states. Applying this framework to Poland under the Law and Justice government, the study examines the country’s structural positioning within the EU, including its economic dependence on the bloc, the absence of constitutional enshrinement of its EU membership, and the government’s efforts to provoke legal conflict with EU institutions while promoting populist Eurosceptic narratives across the Union. By comparing the trajectory of Brexit with the hypothetical possibility of Polexit, the researchers differentiate among three elements: political agency, structural distance, and inherited structure. All three must be present simultaneously for an exit process to become possible, yet political agency emerges as the decisive factor. Poland proves particularly instructive, because strong public support for EU membership coexisted with a government that strategically cultivated antagonism toward EU institutions.

Taken together, the studies in this Research Topic analyze the historical, discursive, political, and institutional processes that convert existing conditions into populist politics and help normalize them. The collective picture that emerges is one in which Central and Eastern Europe should not be viewed as regions inherently prone to populism, a framing that risks essentializing the region and obscuring the contingent political work that populism requires. Instead, the editors present these countries as ideal cases for studying how populism integrates into history, is politically mediated by actors and institutions, is reproduced through routine communication, becomes normalized over time, and ultimately impacts democracy and its quality. The editorial’s contribution lies in shifting the analytical question from why populism happens in this region to how it is made, sustained, and embedded, a reframing with consequences that extend well beyond the borders of Central and Eastern Europe.

Subject of Research: The causes and normalization of populism in Central and Eastern Europe

Article Title: Editorial: Populism's rise in Eastern and Central Europe: causes and implications

Article References: Otova, I., & Staykova, E. (2026). Editorial: Populism's rise in Eastern and Central Europe: causes and implications. Frontiers in Political Science, 8, Article 2003619. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.2003619

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.2003619

Keywords: populism, Central and Eastern Europe, political science, normalization, migration narratives, Euroscepticism, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, democracy, political communication