In Extreme Reactions, Lenka Bustikova has executed a masterful analysis of one of the most vexing questions of our day: Why have radical right parties flourished in some postcommunist East European countries while remaining marginal in others? She uses a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to arrive at her answer: radical right parties achieved their greatest success in those countries that have sizable (but not too sizable) minorities, particularly when those minorities are perceived to enjoy external backing by kin states, thus posing a credible threat to the dominant group’s sovereign control over the state. Where minorities are larger and more threatening, like the Russians in Ukraine, would-be radical right party voters shift their support to mainstream nationalist parties that are perceived to be more effective sovereign counterweights to an empowered minority. By contrast, where minorities are smaller and less threatening but still sizable, like the Hungarians in Slovakia, there is likely to be more sustained support for radical right parties.
At the microlevel, Bustikova’s theory is intuitive yet powerful. She argues that radical right parties emerge in response to electoral and policy victories by their “bilateral opposites,” parties that seek to extend state resources or recognition to ethnic minorities. She defines radical right parties as parties that combine exclusionary nationalist appeals with social conservative elements. Along with Cas Mudde (Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, 2007), she argues that populism is not a constituent characteristic of radical right parties, because their ideology can also be elitist. Instead, support for extremist parties surges due to increased fears of status loss by the ethnonational dominant group. This, in turn, occurs in response to a period of governance by “ethnoliberal” parties (ELP) that favor strengthening ties to the European Union. In her formulation, the party systems of postcommunist European states are characterized by four main blocs—the ethnoliberal party on one end of the sovereignty spectrum, the radical right party on the other end, with two “proximate mainstream” parties in between.
Electoral support for radical right parties rises in reaction to periods of ethnoliberal rule during which the ELP’s mainstream party has offered concessions to ethnic minorities as a way of securing their political support (and, in the 1990s, accession to NATO and the EU). In response, a certain segment of the ethnonational dominant group will vote for radical right parties due to fears that the dominant group (“their” group) is losing dominance over state institutions and resources. Bustikova thus puts forward a demand-side theory that challenges both naïve economic theories that radical right parties emerge or strengthen strictly due to economic insecurities, and cultural backlash theories that extremist parties emerge in response to perceived loss of cultural dominance and xenophobia. Bustikova develops an argument that weaves together elements of these two demand-side accounts. In her view, radical right parties are likely to garner higher electoral support, increasing their chances of exceeding the threshold for representation in parliament and sometimes winning a place in the governing coalition. At the microlevel, economic insecurity combines with ideological opposition to minority concessions to increase the likelihood of an individual’s support for radical right parties.
Bustikova presents her theory in the first two chapters of the book and then turns to a cross-national analysis in chapter 3. Here, she uses demographics and then maps over-time electoral and public opinion data across East European countries to show that fears of status reversal by the dominant group produces upticks in support for right-wing parties, but that this effect is mediated by the size and perceived threat of the minority group. Chapters 4 and 5 contain integrated case studies of radical right parties in Slovakia and Ukraine, respectively. These studies combine observational dataset analysis of opinion and electoral data in both countries with three survey experiments (one in Slovakia and two in Ukraine). She finds that the radical right parties in Slovakia—the Slovak National Party (SNS) and later the Slovak Brotherhood—gained their greatest support after the main ethnic Hungarian party was included in the governing coalition and was able to secure policy concessions for the minority. That Hungarian ethnic party was the SNS’s bilateral opposite. Using survey and electoral data as well as a survey experiment, she shows that SNS voters were uniquely motivated by strongly held preferences that Hungarians should receive fewer benefits. She also shows that support for the far right rose in the wake of salient minority concessions.
Likewise, the radical right party in Ukraine—Svoboda—had a short-lived breakout victory in response to the emergence of the Russian-minority-dominated Communist Party (Svoboda’s bilateral opposite) that governed together with Yanukovich’s Party of the Regions, yielding pro-minority legislation and policies. This triggered the rise of Svoboda, whose voters strongly opposed government support to the Russian minority. Bustikova’s survey experiments reveal that what set Svoboda voters and sympathizers apart from supporters of Tymoshenko’s All-Ukrainian Union “Fatherland” party was their strong opposition to government transfers to the Russian minority. She explains Svoboda’s subsequent decline as a function of would-be supporters’ assessment that the Russian-backed Russian separatists required a bigger counterweight than what a marginal right-wing party could provide.
Bustikova’s reaction theory explains not only the variation in the successes of radical right parties across Eastern Europe but also shifts in the fortunes of these parties over time. It advances the field by integrating backlash and grievance theories into an argument that encompasses both. In doing so, it answers many questions but raises still others.
One might ask, for example, whether the focus on far-right parties does not mask the wider reactionary dynamic of which they are a part. Bustikova acknowledges, in fact, that there is often little light between the mainstream proximate and the radical right party. Sometimes the mainstream proximate co-opts the platform of the extreme right, effectively “crowding out” any potential right-wing contender. In Hungary and Poland, for example, the mainstream conservative parties co-opted the positions of the far right, weakening the existing far-right party and preventing right-wing party entrants, respectively. In Hungary, the post-2010 ruling Fidesz Party adopted the ideological position of the Jobbik Party to such an extent that Jobbik engaged in ethnic underbidding in the 2018 and 2020 elections in order to remain electorally relevant—even cooperating with its liberal nemeses to try to push the ruling Fidesz Party out of its commanding positions in local and national elections. In doing so, the radical right party and its proximate mainstream “traded places” on many issues, including opposition to accepting refugees and the question of whether the George Soros-backed Central European University should be forced out of Hungary. Although Jobbik still adheres to many of its right-wing ideological positions, a focus on the fortunes of this party misses much of the picture of radical right-wing politics in Hungary.
That said, the core of Bustikova’s account finds empirical support in Hungary. Survey research by Karácsony and Róna (“The Secret of Jobbik: Reasons behind the Rise of the Hungarian Radical Right,” Journal of East European and Asian Studies 2(1), 2011) showed that the intensity of anti-Roma attitudes is indeed the principal factor separating Jobbik supporters from their more mainstream Fidesz counterparts. Moreover, Jobbik supporters are strongly opposed to government support for the Roma minority, also consistent with Bustikova’s predictions. However, another reason for Jobbik’s breakthrough in the 2009 European Parliamentary Election was certainly the significant uptick in intercommunal strife between the ethnic communities in the year leading up to the election and the accompanying increased focus in the media on “gypsy crime,” which redounded to the benefit of a party that promised to solve the “Roma problem.” Jobbik’s anticapitalist, antiestablishment message also strengthened its appeal to voters opposed to western integration or dissatisfied with the benefits provided by the postcommunist system (András Kovács, “Antisemitic Prejudice and Political Antisemitism in Present-Day Hungary,” Journal for the Study of Antisemitism 4, 2012). This suggests that a broader complex of factors comprised the reactionary dynamic that led to Jobbik’s historic breakthrough.
In light of this, the question may be asked whether the real action is not between parties but in wider reactionary movements in society. Such movements are sometimes manifested in the radicalization of mainstream conservative parties, sometimes in increased support for marginal extremist parties, and sometimes in both. It may be true, as Bustikova observes, that it is rare for radical right parties to move from the margins to the mainstream, but both the German National Socialists and the Italian Fascists came out of the margins to become their countries’ ruling parties—the first at the ballot box and the second through royal appointment. In other words, two of the most important right-wing dictatorships in history had their origins in broader reactionary movements that catapulted once-marginal parties into positions of total power. It cannot be ruled out that one or more of today’s contemporary far-right parties could completely eclipse their mainstream conservative counterparts—as the National Socialists did to the German National People’s Party in the 1930 federal election. In none of these cases was the boundary between mainstream and extreme right-wing parties clean.
If, in contrast, we accept that understanding the success of far-right parties is important in its own right (whether or not they remain marginal), then it is worth asking what other things make these particular parties distinct from their mainstream counterparts. To answer this question, the ideological characteristics of these parties deserve further investigation. Notably, anti-Semitism, authoritarianism, and antiestablishmentarianism are also hallmarks of Jobbik (Zsolt Enyedi, “Paternalist Populism and Illiberal Elitism in Central Europe,” Journal of Political Ideologies 21(1), 2016), as they are of other far-right parties in the region and elsewhere. And whereas anti-Roma sentiment in Hungary has remained relatively constant over time, anti-Semitism increased substantially after 2006, sentiments that correlated strongly with support for Jobbik. Yet, it is not clear why this is the case or what role, if any, these additional hallmark features play in the story being told here.
None of these questions detract in any way from the quality of Bustikova’s book, a shining example of problem-oriented research that convinces the reader, step by careful step, of a general theory of right-wing party success and failure in the region of Eastern Europe. It also offers future researchers a promising template to guide further investigation of the right-wing political dynamic in the region and beyond. Extreme Reactions is sure to become essential reading for any student of the radical right, as well as anyone seeking to understand the fortunes of right-wing parties in Eastern Europe and in PR systems around the world.
