The Spirit of Democracy, page 26
On the positive side, in most of Central and Eastern Europe, there is intense electoral competition, with political parties alternating in power across a significant ideological spectrum. As new parties have risen, others have retreated into near oblivion or actual extinction, as with Poland’s Solidarity Electoral Action, an alliance of center-right parties that came to power in 1997 but was so plagued by internal bickering that it disappeared from parliament after failing to clear the necessary electoral threshold in 2001.11 Between the collapse of communism in 1989 and 2007, Poland seated thirteen prime ministers in a continual reshuffling of its political landscape. In other countries, electoral politics has settled along a familiar left-right opposition, with two or three parties dominating, as in Hungary, where the Hungarian Socialist Party and the conservative Fidesz-Hungarian Democratic Forum (Fidesz-Magyar Polgári Szövetség) are the main competitors, and in the Czech Republic, where the rightist Civic Democrats and the leftist Social Democrats captured between them two-thirds of the vote in the 2006 elections.
In most countries, the left of the spectrum is anchored (or at least was, for some time) by a successor to the former Communist ruling party. Many held strong support from the public, such as the Bulgarian Socialist Party, which won the country’s first postcommunist elections in 1990 and then oscillated in and out of power.12 In Poland and Hungary, the Communist successor parties were immediately democratic in character and social democratic in ideology (like their West European brethren). The Democratic Left Alliance in Poland ruled until 2005, when it was routed by the Right, which trained the public’s diffuse desire for change on “a weak economy, high unemployment, and high budget deficits” as well as persistent allegations of corruption.13 In Romania, however, the successor left party was a barely reconstructed Communist party that, under the former party functionary Ion Iliescu, ruled for ten of the first fourteen post-Soviet years, most of the time in a highly illiberal fashion and while fashioning “antimarket and xenophobic messages.”14
Over time, the tensions, divisions, and disappointments of the postcommunist era have found expression in public support for authoritarian nationalist parties and candidates and a recurrent (and recently escalating) political mainstreaming or “legitimation of xenophobia.”15 The most infamous example is the ascendance in Serbia of Slobodan Milos?evi, who plunged the region into war by exploiting Serbian nationalist passions and fears. Yet Milos?evi was not unique. During three turns as prime minister, Vladimir Mec?iar stunted the democratic development of Slovakia following its “velvet divorce” from the Czech Republic in 1993. The Greater Romania Party catapulted Vadim Tudor, an antidemocratic xenophobe, to runner-up in the country’s presidential race in 2000.
Numerous smaller, more extreme, and explicitly racist parties have maneuvered their way into ruling coalitions. Xenophobic sentiments in Romania mobilized against ethnic minorities—most often the Roma (Gypsies) but also ethnic Hungarians—and neighboring countries. In Poland and Slovakia, populist movements have happily pulled extremist parties into their governing coalitions.16 The leader of the Slovak National Party—which entered the governing coalition after winning 12 percent of the vote in the June 2006 parliamentary election—“said he would not mind sending the leader of the Hungarian minority to Mars ‘with a one-way ticket.’”17 The second-place candidate in the 2006 Bulgarian presidential election, Videron Siderov of the “National Union Attack” Party, is “a proto-fascist who says he hates Turks, Gypsies and Jews.”18 He lost decisively to the ex-Communist incumbent president, but in the process he garnered a quarter of the second-round vote. In Poland, the new right-wing populist government appointed as its minister of education and deputy prime minister the thirty-five-year-old leader of the ultranationalist, anti-European, and extreme Catholic traditionalist League of Polish Families, Roman Giertych. “Asked about his intention to repudiate Darwinism from school curricula, [he] answered, ‘We’ve managed without tolerance for long enough. And we shall manage without it even now.’”19 The precise programs and political alignments of these populist parties and movements vary, but the one thing they have in common is intolerance: “Eastern Europe’s populists do not act as if they face a political opponent (or ethnic, religious, or sexual minority) with whom they can negotiate, but rather an enemy they must destroy.”20 Sometimes this is also reflected in the extremely hierarchical (or authoritarian) internal governance of these parties.
As in Western Europe, party fragmentation is fostered by the electoral system of proportional representation, which gives seats in parliament in proportion to a party’s share of the overall vote, if it clears an electoral threshold, typically of 3 to 5 percent. This system provides opportunities for niche parties that appeal to distinct social groups with populist messages of anger and protest. An example is the Polish party Samoobrona (Self-Defense), which began in 1992 as a union of small farmers but has reinvented itself as a Euro-skeptic, populist-nationalist party of rural and traditional values. Another is the League of Polish Families, which attracts the older generation in provincial towns and villages.21 Following the 2005 Polish elections, both parties entered the government at the invitation of the socially conservative, center-right winner, the Law and Justice Party, which had been formed only four years before. To reformers, that populist coalition was a disheartening alternative to the expected coalition of Law and Justice with its main election rival, the centrist Civic Platform, an advocate of continued market reforms which, like Law and Justice, could trace roots to the Solidarity movement of the 1980s.
The victory of the Law and Justice Party, which went from 44 parliamentary seats in 2001 to 152 in 2005 (out of 460 in Poland’s lower house), illustrates the political volatility of Central and East European democracies. Throughout the region, free and fair electoral competition is now institutionalized, but the parties that wage this competition are not. Since 1989, parties not only have come and gone from power but have come and gone from the political scene altogether. The bare victory of Romania’s center-right in the 2004 presidential elections came on the wings of a brand-new political party, the Alliance for Truth and Justice, which was able to overcome association with the fractious and ineffective center-right rule that followed the 1996 elections. A pattern has been set of a new political force debuting as the antithesis of corrupt, establishment politics, winning power amid anti-incumbent sentiment, and then squandering public favor through corruption and disappointing policy performance, especially on the economy. In 2001, Bulgaria’s former child king, Simeon II, emerged out of nowhere to win half the parliamentary seats, thrusting aside both the socialists and the (then-ruling) right-of-center Union of Democratic Forces (UDF). By 2005, however, his coalition government “had lost popular support owing to economic difficulties and widespread corruption.”22 That year’s June elections were emblematic of postcommunist party instability: the National Movement for Simeon II (which, in choosing the former king’s name said something significant about its shallowness as a party) lost to the resurgent socialists but nevertheless formed a coalition government with the socialist prime minister and a smaller third party. Negotiations were complicated by the facts that neither of the two principal parties would join a coalition with the new radical nationalist party, Attack, which won 9 percent of the seats, and that the previously dominant UDF won barely 8 percent of the vote.
The situation was no less complicated and fractious in the Czech Republic, where coalitions led by President Vaclav Klaus’s Civic Democratic Party and the leftist Social Democratic Party each won exactly half of the two hundred parliamentary seats, creating a stalemate that blocked formation of a viable government for half a year. Finally, the Civic Democrats were able to form a government in January 2007 when they persuaded two Social Democratic MPs to be absent from the chamber for a confirmation vote. But the public did not take favorably to that cynical bargain, and many in the Civic Democratic camp (including Klaus) also objected to the prominent role of the Green Party in the new government. For the Civic Democrats, the return to the leadership of government—which they had dominated through most of 1990s, until a privatization scandal caused the party to hemorrhage support—was bittersweet and likely, based on regional history, short-lived.
Postcommunist Europe thus presents a mixed picture of vigor and volatility. On the one hand, the new democracies of the East should not be held to higher standards than their West European counterparts, which have also been condemned—and frequently replaced—for sleaziness, influence peddling, cynical political maneuvers, and corruption. Unfortunately, some of this seems to come, invariably, with the terrain of democratic politics, and to become more of a problem as ruling parties stay longer in power. It is difficult from any calculus of democratic norms to complain when the public boots a ruling party or coalition from power out of dissatisfaction with its performance. But there is cause for concern when the practice becomes a habit, and when the habitual rejection of ruling parties reflects a protracted disillusionment with political institutions at large. Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania, for instance, appear mired in a ceaseless search for new and more morally worthy political forces. Even as vote totals shift back and forth, democracy requires some stability in the identity and support bases of its constituent political parties for effective governance—from tamping down budget deficits to forging a consensus on key national issues—to be within reach. That minimum party stability has not yet been achieved in a number of Central and East European democracies.
It is in this light that the rapid unraveling of public order in Hungary—one of the most stable, successful postcommunist democracies—must be pondered. On an audiotape leaked in September 2006, Hungary’s reelected Socialist Party prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsány, was captured admitting that the party had “lied in the morning and lied in the evening” about the state of the country’s finances and had underestimated the budget deficit and made unwarranted promises of social welfare programs in order to win the April 2006 elections.23 Tens of thousands poured into the streets and plazas of Budapest to protest following the revelation, and did so again in October on the fiftieth anniversary of Hungary’s anti-Soviet uprising. Some of the protestors carried World War II–era Nazi Hungarian flags, which were even more visible at the rallies of the rightist opposition party, Fidesz. Opposition feeling was so intense that half a year later, massive steel barriers remained around Hungary’s parliament building “to protect legislators from radical and potentially violent protestors.”24
THE POSTCOMMUNIST STATE OF PLAY
Under pressure from the EU accession process, courts have become more independent and rule-of-law institutions have improved throughout postcommunist Europe. In Romania, for example, the new National Anticorruption Department charged 744 defendants, including high-ranking politicians and magistrates, in 2005 alone, after years of nonaction by a previous anticorruption office.25 In Bulgaria, the national ombudsman has gained the right to hear complaints and investigate corruption allegations, while ethics laws have been tightened and monitoring strengthened through the National Audit Office.26 But the reform process is almost everywhere (even in the most liberal democracies) partial and even tenuous—incremental steps in a long, protracted struggle against the entrenchment and reassertion of special privilege. Prime Minister Gyurcsány’s confession of having lied during the campaign about the economy touched a nerve of resentment regarding the conduct of postcommunist reform. Corruption, a sense of legal and economic unfairness, and broad distrust in political institutions plague the postcommunist European democracies. And when it comes to these issues, the postcommunist divide fades somewhat.
In fact, all postcommunist publics are cynical and dissatisfied—it’s just that the post-Soviet ones are more so. Among the ten new postcommunist members of the European Union, 72 percent think “more than half” or “almost all” their public officials are corrupt. Belarus matches that percentage, while in Russia and Ukraine the figures are 89 and 92 percent respectively. Similarly, an average of 71 percent among the ten EU entrants think their laws are enforced unfairly, while in Russia and Ukraine about 85 percent think so.27 In these and other perceptions of the rule of law, the original eight postcommunist EU entrants are the least negative, with Bulgaria and Romania more negative, and Russia and Ukraine again so. Thus, an average of 57 percent of people in the 2004 EU entrants think their government has “some” or “a lot of” respect for human rights, but only about a third felt this in Romania, Bulgaria, and Russia, and only 27 percent in Ukraine. The pattern holds with regard to democratic satisfaction as well. In 2004, only a quarter of Ukrainians and one out of five Russians were satisfied. In the ten EU entrants (or soon to be entrants), the average was 36 percent—significantly better, though still fairly low.28
There is also a generalized legacy of distrust of political institutions among postcommunist states that transcends the divide. Almost half the public in the first eight EU entrants, and well over half in Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Russia, distrust the courts. In all ten EU entrants, almost two-thirds do not trust the parliament and three-quarters do not trust political parties, quite similar to the averages for Russia and Ukraine (though the former is always more cynical).29 In a more recent Gallup International survey, only one-third of the region’s citizens said they trusted democracy, and just 22 percent felt that their “voice matters.”30
Another reason for the low levels of democratic trust and satisfaction—and for the exceptionally high levels of electoral volatility, and the surge in illiberal populism—is that people in Eastern Europe still feel pressed economically, nearly two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 2003, the unemployment rate was 19 percent in Poland, 17 percent in Slovakia, 28 percent in Serbia and Montenegro, 44 percent in Bosnia, and over 10 percent in each of the three Baltic states.31 In 2004, only about 30 percent of Central and East Europeans felt they were getting enough money from their main source of income “to buy what you really need.” The figure was the same for Ukraine and Belarus; in Russia it was only 14 percent. Slightly over half of the public in the postcommunist EU ten even claimed that their household economic situation was better before the transition to the private market, and a similar percentage was unsatisfied with the current economic situation of their household.32 The belief that corruption is widespread, and the particular disenchantment with its role in making many former Communists manifestly rich during the privatization process, inflames these feelings of economic hardship and stress. The current upsurge of illiberal, antielitist populist forces is poised to reassert state involvement in the economy while denouncing “external threats to sovereignty” and promoting skepticism about globalization and European integration. Consequently, “the assumption . . . that joining the European Union would cause Eastern European countries to consolidate their new democracies now seems to have been overly optimistic.”33 Yet, even Jacques Rupnik, the liberal French chronicler of East European illiberal populism, expresses some confidence that time and the constraints of the European Union “may be working against the populists.”34
Moreover, if the principal challenge in Central and Eastern Europe is to strengthen democracy and make it more lawful, tolerant, accountable, and responsive, in most of the post-Soviet states the challenge is much cruder and more fundamental. The twelve post-Soviet states (leaving aside the democratic EU member states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) are mostly caught in varying forms of authoritarian rule or outright dictatorship. Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova are tenuous democracies (at best). Armenia and Kyrgyzstan have some significant elements of civic space and electoral competition, but within a context that lacks the wider political freedom and electoral fairness of democracy. The other post-Soviet states are authoritarian—extremely so in the case of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan (which have the worst possible scores on the Freedom House scales of political rights and civil liberties), and quite substantially in the case of Russia, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan. The progressive narrowing of the political arena and victimization of opposition parties, civic movements, and independent journalists have strangled democracy in Russia and made Belarus a dictatorship, as we saw in chapter 3. These repressive trends have beleaguered other post-Soviet states, though none of them began with the degree of political pluralism and democracy that Russia enjoyed in the early 1990s.
With their electoral revolutions in 2003 and 2004, Georgia and Ukraine have implemented institutional reforms that have made them more democratic and accountable. But in each case, significant impediments to democracy remain, far beyond those facing the new Central and East European democracies. In Ukraine since the Orange Revolution, freedom for civil society organizations and the media has increased and become more legally embedded.35 Under a new constitution, the domineering power of the presidency has been diminished in favor of a more powerful elected parliament that holds independent authority to name the prime minister (as in the established democracies of postcommunist Europe). In the March 2006 elections for parliament, the opposition, pro-Russian Party of Regions, the authoritarian party that was defeated in the Orange Revolution, rebounded to win a plurality and formed a new government. But in large measure, severe internal divisions among democracy advocates opened the way for the Party of Regions, which only won a third of the vote in “the freest” election “in the country’s fifteen years of independence.”36 The hero of the Orange Revolution, President Viktor Yushchenko, has proved a rather ineffectual leader, unable to govern with his principal rival, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, in the pro-reform coalition. In September 2005, a piqued Yushchenko dismissed the opposition government, and in an attempt to make up for his lack of support in parliament, fell to the temptation of trying to extend his presidential power beyond its formal limits. While some improvements have been made in the judiciary under Yushchenko, the system remains weak and heavily influenced by the executive, and governmental corruption remains widespread.
