CONSIDERING THE CHANGE OF THE NEO-COMMUNIST PARTIES IN POWER IN CENTRAL EUROPE : A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF POLISH AND HUNGARIAN CASES

Year 2008, Volume: 13 Issue: 3, 123 - 142, 01.01.2008

Erhan Büyükakıncı

Abstract

The 1990s have witnessed many structural changes in the Central and Eastern European countries after the “Velvet Revolutions” and today all these states have been gradually becoming members of the EU and have also become involved in cooperation for an integrated European security architecture. In their domestic politics, it is also possible to consider the impact of the post-Communist transition on their political restructuring. As there have been many governmental changes in Central and Eastern European countries since the beginning of the 1990s, external factors have seemed to influence the political process at domestic level. To study all these phenomena, we prefer to limit our research to the Polish and Hungarian cases. The people in these countries are expecting such high sensitivity for their own socioeconomic concerns from the politicians in power, while the political structures, especially the neo-Communists, aim to restructure their own discourse in the political life. Given the general failure of the neoCommunist parties in general and presidential elections, this work aims to find out the reasons for that decline within the context of international and domestic factors in Central Europe from a comparative perspective. Such study is also an attempt to answer the question whether there is some linkage between the external and internal factors within this new process

Keywords

Central Europe, Poland, Hungary, Post-Communism, Neo-Communist parties, Social Democracy, Power