Understanding the politics of the Right in contemporary East-Central Europe

Despite their importance in contemporary European politics, parties of the centre-right remain a strikingly under-researched area in both West European and, in particular in, post-communist Eastern European comparative politics. Compared with the voluminous literature on the left-wing communist successor parties or on the extreme right, little has been written on post-communist centre-right formations in terms of either empirical case studies or attempts to develop explanatory frameworks. In addition to the vague boundaries between far right and centre-right in Eastern Europe, liberal and agrarian parties, which have been absorbed into consolidated centre-right blocs in most West European democracies, often appear as small ‘centrist’ groups in a post-communist context. Further unresolved questions concerning the origins of the post-communist centre-right; its social bases, ideologies and responses to the new challenges of Europeanization and globalization combine to make it a particularly rich, if complex, vein of comparative research that has so far gone largely unaddressed. This article presents a discussion and overview of these issues as an introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics on the centre-right in Eastern Europe