The ‘Populist Explosion’ in the West and its Effect on the NMS
The ‘Populist Explosion’ in the West and its Effect on the NMS

The Polish and Hungarian Blind Alley of Populism Compared

Summary/Abstract: The key messages of this paper can be summarized in three statements: First, the new wave of populism, as neopopulism, has been shaped in the current age of information society first of all in the terms of ‘cultural’ globalization as identity politics. Second, since the outbreak of global crisis in the late 2000s there has been an ‘alienation’ between the Core and the Periphery in the EU with very marked features in the ‘East’, in New Member States as widespread disappointment of populations with the results of EU membership. Third, Poland and Hungary have been pioneering in this process of divergence from the EU mainstream and in the emergence of the anti-EU populist elites, so they represent the classical case of Eupopulism in the Eastern periphery in the EU. Thus, this paper focuses on the specificity of neopopulism in NMS within the EU first of all by analysing the emergence of authoritarian populism in Poland and Hungary.

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