About FATIGUE

Our approach to understanding the rise of illiberal and populist politics in Central and Eastern Europe is based on the concept of ‘delayed transformational fatigue’. It is designed to capture the gradually intensifying disappointment with the results of the initial period of reforms, particularly with the performance of the dominant post-communist elites. 

They are increasingly blamed for the shortcomings of the new system and many undesired outcomes of the transformations, such as the rising level of unemployment in some periods. The sense of political exclusion and economic defeat has been slowly growing among some sectors of the populace after 1989, prompting eventually the search for novel interpretations of the situation and reassuring political solutions. As Ost observes:

‘’Many turned to the right because the right offered them an outlet for their economic anger and a narrative to explain their economic problems that liberals, believing they held sway over workers, consistently failed to provide. In the end, workers drifted to the right because their erstwhile intellectual allies pushed them there.’’

Ost’s explanation captures an important part of the complex process, but it is incomplete. He identifies – correctly in our view – the emergence of the delayed demand for new ideas, narratives, and political solutions. But while some ‘callous’ intellectuals and politicians might have been guilty of ‘pushing’ (via indifference), others have been hard at work at ‘pulling’ workers (and other people) toward (right-wing) populist explanations and policy recommendations. 

Exclusion, alienation and lack of security

A robust explanation of the ‘Orbanisation’ of Hungarian politics or the Law and Justice’s somewhat unexpected 2015 electoral victory in Poland needs to be based, therefore, on an analysis focused equally on the supply and demand sides of politics. On the demand side, it is a delayed response to the transformational hardships and the sense of exclusion, alienation and the lack of security, intensified by the effects of the economic crisis of 2008. This seems to be the hallmark of the late phase of democratic consolidation. 

On the supply side, it is the skilful elaboration and propagation of illiberal/populist narratives that are, as always, directed against two adversaries: elitism and pluralism. Furthermore, we believe that the relative success of populist framing of the situation has something to do with the prior mobilisation of neo-traditionalism whose emergence is briefly signalled above.

The Fatigue project is designed to study in-depth all those phenomena.