Photograph Source: © European Union, 1998 – 2026
Romania was late to politics which saw parties representing the left and right unite against liberals. But unite they did this week, in what the founder of Russia’s former “National Bolsheviks,” Alexander Dugin, presciently described in 2008 as movements “against the center.” Dugin predicted these left/right alliances would crush liberalism. Instead, they mostly acted performatively to knock off liberals while nationalists opportunistically seized state power to chiefly benefit themselves in new clientelist clans, rather than acting as transformative agents for advancing any national interest. The result was to just replace one set of elites (usually anchored to global interests) with another set of elites (typically anchored at the national level).
Meanwhile, two weeks prior, neighboring Hungary saw populist-right Viktor Orban replaced by his former understudy Péter Magyar and his Tisza center-right party, promising the return of Hungary to the pro-EU camp. But, the 2026 parliamentary elections were the first in post-communist Hungary where left parties failed to garner the minimum vote necessary for legislative representation.
European electorates have increasingly proved fickle in the 21st century, and more so since the 2008 financial crash. Electorates no longer are anchored to parties as they were in the previous century, where parties in power often implemented party programs and represented real class interests, at least they did before the European Union and the victory of neoliberalism under the EU’s Maastricht Treaty of 1992. Whether inside or out of the eurozone, neoliberal globalizing forces have transferred ever more power to banks and created infrastructures for capital flight from “uncooperative” states, making real change difficult.
This is all to say that much of Central and Eastern Europe lacks much of a genuine democratic left force in politics. The last popular democratic threat was Greece’s Syriza, which, 11 years ago, under their Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, challenged, if not threatened, the European Central Bank’s (ECB) power over national economies. When Syriza’s Prime Minister surrendered to the ECB, the European left was mostly killed off thereafter as electorates saw them unwilling to truly confront austerity. Thus, the political terrain has chiefly been dominated by political liberals and rightists, with the latter often being oligarchs cosplaying nationalists, or at least funding them from behind the curtain in the Emerald City of the Wizard of Oz.
Following the global 2008 financial crisis, Viktor Orban won power in 2010 in Hungary then suffering under the economic crisis. Orban might not have lasted 16 years in power if it were not for his gerrymandering of Hungary’s parliament and taking control of their judiciary. But make no mistake, Fidesz and its program of anti-immigration and taxing foreign capital once was popular.
Only a year ago, Romania soundly defeated the nationalist George Simion. Simion had to be called in as a substitute for the right-wing Călin Georgescu who was banned from running due to some trifling sums funding his social media campaign that likely was of Russian provenance. To be direct, he was really banned because he voiced Kremlin-friendly policies and had solid prospects for winning. Georgescu repackaged old superstitions as New Age hokum and combined this with policy privileging the nation over the state (EU as superstate). Simion by contrast, was a political novice coming from football ultras. That alone didn’t defeat the upstart Simion. He needed Romania’s Hungarian minority vote, but part of Simion’s youthful hooliganism consisted of kicking over Hungarian gravestones, thus blunting any sales pitch directed at Hungarians. By contrast, his liberal opponent, an all-around nice guy, math whiz and European-friendly relatable to urban educated youth, Nicușor Dan, sailed to an easy victory.
What to do in power? Romania became the EU’s tiger economy over the past decade. But Dan’s election coincided with Romania hitting the proverbial “middle-income trap” as it hit the ceiling of its development model. With public debt mounting, Romania’s liberal government imposed budget cuts (austerity) in hopes of restoring macro-economic fundamentals. The effect was to turn off the money spigot off to the many clientelist centers of power in government. These areas were represented by the Social Democrats, largely the inheritors of state institutions under communism. This clientelist “left” and then united with the nationalist political right to move “against the (liberal) center” of Romania’s government.
Thus, outside of tiny Kosovo, no left-wing party has risen to rule in Europe today, as the legacy of Syriza’s surrender to the ECB in 2015 remains. What has, however, operated since 2008 have been alternating cycles of nationalist clientelist parties that win office until electorates tire of them. At such points, liberals assume power again, until the limits of neoliberal economics reveal it can’t sustain socio-economic health. The cycle then repeats with nationalists again taking power, or as in the case of Romania, with the old sclerotic left clientist parties uniting with the nationalist right “against the center.” The question remains how long this cycle of alternating rinse and repeat takeovers of power, and failure to deliver, can continue, until a genuinely democratic movement, or truly extreme right-wing party, captures power? Sadly, unless the former can prevail before the latter, we are likely to eventually find out.
