Central European nationalism: Populist watch

Date: 10/04/04

A populist resurgence in central Europe

AS IF by some compensatory principle, central Europe lost one pariah president this week just as another loomed into view. The departing figure was Rolandas Paksas, the scandal-swamped president of Lithuania, dismissed by a parliamentary vote on April 6th after 15 months in office. His main sin was to surround himself with ill-qualified cronies who had interfered in government decisions at the behest of business and perhaps even criminal interests. The favourite to succeed him is Valdas Adamkus, a decent and elderly centrist who was Mr Paksas's predecessor as president; or, if he chooses to run, Algirdas Brazauskas, another ex-president who is currently prime minister.

A new candidate has emerged to take over as Europe's least-admired head of state west of Minsk: Vladimir Meciar, who won a first round of voting for Slovakia's presidency on April 3rd and looks likely to win the run-off on April 17th. As prime minister of Slovakia until 1998, Mr Meciar was a backward-looking bully and at times scarcely a democrat, though he claims to have changed for the better.

In both Lithuania and Slovakia, the presidency is mainly ceremonial. But a bad incumbent can still be a nuisance to the government, a diplomatic embarrassment, and a danger to national security. Mr Paksas crossed into the danger zone when he came under the spell of a dubious Russian-born businessman called Yuri Borisov. Mr Borisov bankrolled Mr Paksas's presidential campaign.

Foreign governments pressed Lithuania to clean house before it joined NATO last week and the European Union on May 1st. Mr Paksas helped to speed his own demise by trying to give Mr Borisov a job even after impeachment proceedings were under way. This gesture cost the president most waverers in parliament, and caused some to question his state of mind. But Mr Paksas, who is not yet 50, had some 40% of the public on his side at the height of impeachment proceedings, according to Vilmorus, a Lithuanian polling firm. He may yet return as a force in national politics - even if he has to match the tenacity of Mr Meciar, who languished for six years on the Slovak parliament's backbenches before this week's breakthrough.

Mr Meciar did better than expected in the presidential election, winning 33% of the vote. His chief rival in the polls, Eduard Kukan, foreign minister in the centre-right government, did worse, winning only 22%. But the big surprise was that Ivan Gasparovic, a former right-hand man to Mr Meciar who now heads a splinter party of his own, finished a whisker ahead of Mr Kukan. That put paid to hopes for a second round in which voters would rally behind Mr Kukan to shut out Mr Meciar. Instead, Mr Meciar will confront a pale imitation of himself, and must accordingly be the favourite to prevail.

Mr Meciar is supported still by many voters who backed him in the 1990s - rural folk, pensioners and low-paid workers, longing for the social benefits, simple lives and guaranteed jobs that communism once promised them. Mr Paksas and other regional populists, whether of right or left, play to similar audiences. Poverty ensures a loud voice in politics for anger and envy, which blur into bigoted nationalism.

A rising protest vote in Poland has turned a small-farmers' movement, Samoobrona, into a leading political party. An unreformed Communist Party is gaining ground in the Czech Republic. In Romania, which hopes to join the EU in 2007, the xenophobic Greater Romania Party enjoys not only popularity but respectability. Even Slovenia, the richest and primmest of this year's EU entrants, voted overwhelmingly in a referendum on April 4th against restoring civic rights to members of ethnic minorities denied citizenship without cause after independence in 1991.

Prosperity will no doubt smooth such rough edges. But it will take decades to reach most of central Europe. If the likes of Mr Meciar or Samoobrona get their way, it may never arrive in some countries.