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Sezin Öney, originally from Turkey, is based in Budapest and Istanbul. She her journalism career as a foreign news reporter in 1999 and she turned into political analysis as a columnist since 2007. Her interest in her main academic subject area of populism was sparked almost decade ago; and now she focuses specifically on populist leadership, and populism in Turkey and Hungary. She studied international relations, nationalism, international law, Jewish history, comparative politics and discourse analysis across Europe.
In Eastern Europe, Populism Lives, Widening A Split In The EU
The author of this article, Steven Erlanger, argues that:
"the populist surge that threatened this year to engulf Western Europe and created existential worries for Brussels seems to have slowed, if not crested".
Erlanger is a veteran journalist who has been observing European affairs for decades. He is the London bureau chief for The New York Times. The initial part of his argument is open to debate. But, what is of more interest is the second part of his argument that Central and Eastern Europe has "become a showcase for populism in its many varieties" and this is widening a fissure within the European Union. Erlanger points out that:
The four countries of the European Union’s east that make older members anxious — Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia — are all led by populists of one stripe or another.
Czech Republic's Andrej Babis, Hungary's Viktor Orban, Poland's Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Slovakia's Robert Fico are all populist "charismatic" leaders that dominate their parties and moreover, their country's politics. While there is no single set of thought, or ideological backbone uniting these leaders and their movements, they seem to have a common scapegoat: immigration. The aforementioned countries are facing neither an influx of immigrants, nor are they key destination points for refugees; but "reality" does not seem to matter. These populist leaders play the anxiety card well.
Erlanger's article is interesting as it compares and contrasts Central and Eastern Europe's populist surges by specifically focusing on the leaders. "Charismatic leadership" in our contemporary times is an understudied area, and the leader's centrality for populism in Central and Eastern Europe and far beyond should make us think further about why voters across the world are so affected by such polarizing figures. At the end of the day, the Eastern European variant of populism may not be a geographically isolated and diverse phenomenon, just as the Western European variant.
