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

Populism has become a central theme in 21st-century political science, with several key approaches emerging to explain it: as an ideology, a discourse, a strategy and a political style. However, no single model can fully explain the manifestations of populism, either in general or specifically in Central and Eastern Europe. The region's political development is shaped by diverse nation-building processes; a shared yet specific legacy of authoritarianism and communism; democratic transition and European integration; and geopolitical factors. The articles in this Research Topic demonstrate that these conditions are significant, but not automatic causes of the emergence, development or normalization of populism. Rather, they acquire political significance through processes of agency, articulation and institutionalization.

Despite the robust historical reasoning and conceptual tools developed within comparative politics, research on populism has largely avoided engaging with these resources, as Crăciun points out. Rather than treating populism primarily as a contemporary phenomenon, he introduces the concept of “populist configurations” to situate conditions, institutions, actors, and events within a single framework and across time. This approach is particularly relevant to Central and Eastern Europe, where state formation, contested sovereignty, external domination, and successive regime transformations have shaped political development. Using the Romanian case, the article creates a typology, a timeline, and an illustrative example of a populist anti-Semitism configuration. This aims to showcase the benefits of this research approach and to advocate for a systematic historical shift in studying populism. Its aim, therefore, 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 in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond (Crăciun).

Romanian research on media coverage of protests and parliamentary debates from 2020 to 2024 emphasizes configuration over a straightforward cause-and-effect model. By analyzing elements such as people-centredness, anti-elitism, exclusionary “othering,” sovereignties, and crisis framing across civic and institutional spheres, the study finds no consistent pattern of populist themes spreading from protests to parliament or vice versa. Instead, it reveals a pattern of “parallel politicisation”: parliamentary discourse consistently discusses populist themes in a stable and routine manner, while protest communication is irregular, fragmented, and event dependent. The limited temporal and semantic connection between these arenas suggest that populist politicization can persist independently of continuous transmission between civic and institutional spaces. Consequently, populism may become embedded in institutional communication practices even when civic mobilization is sporadic. This challenges simple supply- or demand-driven models and underscores the importance of routine political communication in maintaining populist discourse (Rammelt and Bujdei-Tebeica).

Questions of normalization are also central to the Bulgarian case. The analysis argues that, since 2001, populist ideas and practices have become enduring features of the political system. The proposed typology distinguishes between anti-elitist and nationalist orientations, as well as between analog and digital forms of populism. Migration narratives are presented as one mechanism through which this normalization unfolds. The analysis shows that crisis cannot be reduced to demographic scale alone; rather, it is politically and discursively produced. Through 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” can legitimize exclusionary policies and erode liberal norms through the language of democratic care (Otova and Staykova).

The analysis of Hungary examines the construction of the threat from a related but distinct perspective, using the concept of the “imported enemy.” The 2015 migration crisis is viewed less as the primary cause of the mobilization of right-wing populism and more as a catalyst that triggered pre-existing identity-related anxieties amid normalized hostility. A marginalized or rare group can become a powerful object of fear when state discourse, legal measures, media campaigns and normative prejudices transform it into a symbol of cultural danger, loss of sovereignty and national vulnerability. Long-standing anti-Roma prejudices are significant in this regard, as they form part of an established pattern of exclusion. Once institutionalized, this mechanism can normalize exclusion and cement belonging and citizenship within a moralized understanding of “us” and “them” (Duche-Pérez et al.).

The article on Brexit offers an original analytical framework for assessing the likelihood of an exit from the EU in other Member States where populist Euroscepticism is also significant. Applying this framework to Poland under the “Law and Justice” government, the article examines Poland's structural positioning within the EU: its economic dependence, the lack of constitutional enshrinement of its EU membership, and PiS's efforts to provoke a legal conflict with the EU institutions, as well as to promote populist Eurosceptic narratives across the EU. By comparing the trajectory of Brexit with the possibility of Polexit, the study differentiates among political agency, structural distance, and inherited structure. These three elements must be present simultaneously for an exit process to become possible, yet political agency emerges as the decisive factor. Poland is a particularly instructive case, since strong public support for EU membership can coexist with a government that strategically cultivates antagonism toward EU institutions (Dunin-Wasowicz et al.).

Overall, the articles analyse the historical, discursive, political, and institutional processes that turn existing conditions into populist politics and help normalize them. Central and Eastern Europe are presented not as regions inherently prone to populism but as ideal cases for studying how populism integrates into history, is politically mediated, reproduced institutionally, becomes normalized, and impacts democracy and its quality.

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Footnotes

Edited and reviewed by: Wenfang Tang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China