Book Review: When Left Moves Right: The Decline of the Left and the Rise of the Populist Right in Postcommunist Europe, by Maria Snegovaya (Oxford University Press, 2024, ISBN 978-0197699034)
By Hadas Aron
The rise of populism and its frequent presence in government has been the most prominent political phenomenon in post-communist Europe. Numerous studies explore various dimensions of this phenomenon, but few provide a comprehensive comparative analysis like that of When Left Moves Right, Maria Snegovaya’s new book. Drawing on extensive research, Snegovaya contends that the realignment of post-Communist Party systems over the past two decades is largely driven by the economic shift of left-wing, formerly communist, parties toward the right.
The book places post-communist Europe within a broader European context. Its central thesis is that left-wing parties across Europe embraced right-wing neoliberal economic policies in the 1990s and early 2000s. This strategic shift yielded short-term electoral gains, but it had unintended long-term consequences. The left gradually lost its identity and its core working-class support base. More significantly, this shift paved the way for the rise of right-wing populism in two key ways. First, the convergence of the left and right on economic policies elevated the importance of non-economic, cultural issues—areas where the populist right held a clear advantage. Second, the left’s move to the right created space for the populist right to recalibrate its economic platform, adopting more distributive policies and successfully appealing to the working class by blending left-leaning economic stances with nationalist and nativist cultural positions. This resulted in a profound realignment of political systems, with the populist right securing traditional leftist voters and pushing the left out of the political arena altogether.
Hadas Aron, “Book Review: When Left Moves Right: The Decline of the Left and the Rise of the Populist Right in Postcommunist Europe, by Maria Snegovaya (Oxford University Press, 2024, ISBN 978-0197699034),” Journal of Illiberalism Studies 5, no. 2 (Summer 2025): 135-138, https://doi.org/10.53483/ZCQA3607.
The book has notable strengths. It meticulously traces the political trajectory of the region since the collapse of communism, providing both a broad overview and detailed case studies. To do so, it employs a rich array of evidence, including survey analysis, an original survey experiment, and multiple case study analyses. The deliberate focus on the economic drivers behind populism’s success is particularly valuable. In post-communist Europe, populist parties not only make economic appeals to gain power, but they also employ economic clientelist tactics to stay in power—often more effectively than their cultural mobilization strategies. Yet, as Snegovaya points out, much of the literature has disproportionately focused on the more attention-grabbing cultural appeals. She effectively underscores the connections between economic and cultural appeals. In post-communist Europe, cultural appeals often focus on national identity and sovereignty vis-à-vis the European Union, a populist articulation of economic grievances. More broadly, the book highlights the centrality of the transition from communism and accession to the EU in determining present-day political outcomes. Both processes essentially removed economic issues from public debate and political competition, leading to the rise in the saliency of cultural issues, and fueling economic resentment.
The book draws on theories originally developed to explain Western European political trends and applies them to Eastern Europe. Interestingly, these theories that center on working-class voters seem to fit Eastern European politics better. As demonstrated in chapter 2, working-class voters in Eastern Europe tend to abandon left-wing parties when they adopt right-wing economic policies.[1] The working class in Eastern Europe remains sizable and can still serve as an electoral basis for a winning coalition. This is not the case for Western Europe. As Snegovaya shows, the working class in Western Europe has significantly shrunk in the past decades.[2] Scholars such as Abou-Chadi and Wagner have shown that voter preferences on social spending in Western Europe no longer align neatly along the traditional left-right spectrum.[3] Iversen and Soskice, meanwhile, propose a nuanced theory linking demographic and economic changes to politics. They argue that the rise of populism stems from the shift toward a knowledge-based economy and the failure of the political system to address job insecurities that follow from it. This economic transition reduced social solidarity and fragmented the middle class: some continue to favor redistribution but resist sharing with disadvantaged groups, while others no longer strongly support a redistributive state.[4] The shrinking size of the working class and the increasingly diverse preferences of the working and middle classes have created a significant challenge for left-wing parties in Western Europe seeking to build a winning coalition. In many cases, such as in the UK, leftist parties have opted for right-wing economic policies after spending years in the opposition.
While the path to electoral success for social democratic parties in Western Europe is complex, the range of options for their counterparts in Eastern Europe was even more constrained. As Snegovaya’s case studies illustrate, in the context of the post-communist transition—particularly with the push toward EU accession—harsh, Western-driven reforms were nearly inescapable. Left-wing parties struggled the most where they happened to be in power during the lead-up to accession. In countries like Hungary and Poland, socialist parties had to rebrand to stay politically viable, as their association with the old regime became a liability tantamount to political suicide. In the Czech Republic, a relatively favorable case for the left, the orthodox Communist Party was fully discredited. It had been excluded from the roundtable transition talks and thus was never in a position to rebrand. As a result, its successor party, the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM), remained a perpetual opposition party. Still, as Snegovaya’s theory predicts, its presence did keep some traditional working-class voters on the left and allowed the party to continue appealing to the working class in the following years. The other left-wing party, the Czech Social Democratic Party (CSSD), did participate in government, and while it maintained a more leftist stance than the social democrats in Hungary and Poland, it too was punished for its role in implementing reforms. Ultimately, the CSSD collapsed, albeit a few years after its Hungarian and Polish counterparts.
One significant left-wing party that avoided this fate is Smer in Slovakia. As Snegovaya notes, Slovakia’s political trajectory was notably different from that of the other countries in this study.[5] Democratization and economic reforms were delayed in Slovakia, and no major political forces pushed strongly for them. Smer, unlike traditional social democratic parties, is a nationalist and populist party with a relatively left-leaning economic agenda. In recent years, however, the party has become increasingly populist, escalating its attacks on Slovakia’s liberal democratic institutions. Thus, though Smer prevented the success of a populist right-wing party in Slovakia, illiberal populism may have emerged from a different path. It is also noteworthy that the Czech Republic and Slovakia separated only after the transition from communism. The Velvet Divorce was largely driven by Slovak elites seeking to establish a stronger sphere of influence. This separation may have eased tensions within the political elite of each successor state, providing temporary political stability that lasted for the next couple of decades.
Tensions within political elites played a significant role in the rise of populism in the region. The book explores the shift of right-wing populist parties to a more left-leaning, distribution-oriented economic agenda. This is an important point that captures the political trajectory of the region. Following EU accession, parties had more flexibility in choosing their economic agenda and taking an anti-EU stance. Emerging political elites seized the opportunity and built an all-encompassing nationalist narrative that stressed the loss of state and national sovereignty vis-à-vis the EU and mobilized economic and cultural grievances.
One of the questions the book explores is whether left-wing parties can regain the support of the working class. Snegovaya argues that the political realignment in post-communist countries makes this difficult, as many voters have already been absorbed into populist parties. This challenge is especially pronounced in countries where populist parties hold power, as they often use clientelist networks to distribute benefits to their supporters. Compounding this difficulty is the issue of democratic erosion. In several post-communist states, most notably Hungary, the weakening of rule-of-law norms and institutions, along with a heavily biased media landscape, makes it difficult for opposition parties to gain traction. While policy platforms remain important, the primary obstacle to electoral success for opposition parties has shifted to their increasing inability to get the chance to fairly compete and effectively reach voters in increasingly compromised democratic environments.
When Left Moves Right is an important read for anyone looking to understand the politics of post-communist Europe and how it aligns with the continent’s broader historical and political trajectory since 1989. Too often, this region has been overlooked in the study of Europe, and this book helps to address that gap. Moreover, the book demonstrates the political trajectory of social democratic parties in Eastern Europe and beyond, shedding light on one of the most important political transformations since the 1990s. In post-communist Europe, the misreading of political realities over the past three decades was probably not limited to left-wing parties. Like many observers inside and outside the region, the left anticipated that these countries would follow a path similar to Western Europe’s, with highly educated, prosperous populations, knowledge-based economies, and shrinking working classes. However, that transformation never fully materialized, and the political systems adapted to the realities of the post-transition era in unexpected ways. One thing many in Eastern and Western Europe certainly share is a sense of unmet expectations over the last few decades.
[1] Maria Snegovaya, When Left Moves Right: The Decline of the Left and the Rise of the Populist Right in Postcommunist Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).
[2] Snegovaya, When Left Moves Right, 37.
[3] Tarik Abou-Chadi and Markus Wagner, “The Electoral Appeal of Party Strategies in Postindustrial Societies: When Can the Mainstream Left Succeed?” Journal of Politics 81, no. 4 (October 2019): 1405–19, https://doi.org/10.1086/704436.
[4] Torben Iversen and David Soskice, Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism through a Turbulent Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
[5] Snegovaya, When Left Moves Right, 165–169.
