Third ways or new ways?: The post-communist left in Central Europe

Communist successor parties in central Europe are not a homogeneous group of political actors. Processes of organisational reform undertaken in the immediate post-1989 period placed them on a programmatic trajectory which has since proven difficult to successfully modify. Parties that centralised power around a small group of elite actors have enjoyed more flexibility in their attempts to maximise votes and remain ideologically broad. Parties that radically democratised by empowering their memberships and/or middle-ranking officials have remained much more ideologically conservative and have tend to be neo-communist in orientation. This has strongly affected not just their positions in national party systems, but also their attitudes and behaviour towards foreign actors/institutions. Some communist successor parties therefore remain side-lined on the anti-capitalist far-left while others have developed into confident, outward-looking centre-left actors while one - the Slovak SDL - imploded on account of its own internal contradictions.