Eastern Europe and the right-wing wave: reasons, current situation and responses from the left
BY OLEG VERNYK https://lis-isl.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/RP-N6-ingles-hoja-por-hoja.pdf The tendency to strengthen right-wing and far-right forces in Eastern Europe has recently become very popular for both serious studies and countless, often unscrupulous, speculations on the topic. Therefore, it is very important for the socialist reader to delve deeper into this topic, to understand the reasons for the current situation, its course and to find the optimal direction of a left-wing policy. Often, Eastern European leftist forces are simply unable to raise anything in opposition to the right-wing wave, and the global left does not understand how it can help the Eastern European left. Naturally, the weakness and insufficiency of truly socialist forces in this region of the planet more directly affects the current political balance. And here it is important to point out one of the key theses of our analysis: the current growth and strengthening of the influence of the right and the far right in Eastern Europe, as well as the extreme weakness of the socialist forces in this region, have common causes and are closely linked and intertwined. We will try to highlight some of them. The collapse of stalinism caused a turn to the right The liberal discourse was substituted by a right-wing conservative one With the end of World War II, almost all of Eastern Europe was covered by the so-called people's democracies, which to one degree or another copied the economic and political structure of the Soviet Union. Stalin took advantage of the presence of the Soviet army in the countries of Eastern Europe to exert a decisive influence on the outcome of the post-war political struggle in these countries. The Stalinist parties, which enjoyed both the support of broad sections of the working class and the support of the army, defeated the bourgeois parties in the parliamentary elections and established their monopoly of political power. The strict subordination of these parties to Moscow's policies and the course of abandoning the ideas of workers' democracy almost immediately formed a model of "deformed workers' states." It is important to note that, in fact, no "deformation" took place since initially there was no anti-capitalist and workers' revolution there, and the Stalinist models were initially implemented with the bayonets of the army. It is no secret that in the face of the long presence of the Soviet army and the Stalinist regimes, the working masses gradually began to perceive them as occupiers. These feelings intensified especially in the countries of the so-called Warsaw Pact (created in 1955 under the control of the USSR in defiance of the Western imperialist NATO bloc), after the destruction of the Hungarian workers' revolution (1956) by the Soviet army and the invasion of Czechoslovakia to restore local control of the Moscow Communist Party (1968). The bureaucratic model of planned economy, which was a copy of the USSR, did not allow the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe to show any advantage over the rapidly developing capitalist economies in Western Europe. The marked lag in economic development and in the standard of living of the population of the Eastern countries as compared to the Western ones considerably increased the already critical feelings towards the Stalinist regimes that were still in power by the bayonets of the army. Of course, it was liberal-bourgeois ideas that were widely spread among the masses at that time. The perestroika announced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the USSR in 1985 enabled the masses almost instantly, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to sweep away the authoritarian Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe and initiate the restoration of capitalism. However, it is important to note that the process in many former Warsaw Pact countries turned out to be like a bucket of cold water over the hot and aching heads of the masses and illusions in capitalism quickly evaporated. Often the restoration of capitalism was accompanied by the destruction of entire industries that had previously been oriented to the USSR market. Mass unemployment of the population pushed millions of young workers to seek employment in Western European countries. The increase in social psychological depression and disillusionment with capitalism gradually began to acquire conservative characteristics, the influence of the Church grew, the clericalization of the population increased, and nationalist and far-right sentiments intensified. The entry of former Warsaw Pact countries into the European Union was also accompanied from the outset by a higher level of illusions and expectations of the residents of Eastern European countries. However, it soon became clear that the rules of the European Union are determined, first and foremost, by the interests of capital in the leading Western European countries. And not all Eastern countries are within the sphere of interests of the leading Western capitals. Once again, the so-called countries of the "young European democracies" found themselves in an extremely difficult economic situation that affected the political sentiments of their voters. It is important to note here that such a healthy political phenomenon as "Euroskepticism" gradually began to transform in the mass consciousness into extreme forms of nationalism, clericalism, conservative security and traditionalism. This, in turn, caused many prominent bourgeois populist politicians in Eastern Europe to move sharply away from liberal to right-wing populist political discourse. As part of this "turn", the populists brought to the fore objective issues for the broad masses. For example, Hungary's right-wing populist leader Viktor Orbán declared war on speculator and representative of global finance capital George Soros, who is of Hungarian-Jewish origin. Soros, as a global transcontinental player, came up with the concept of open society, which allows putting local governments and capitals under the control of globalized capital. For his part, Orbán deployed the policy of "Hungary's independent development" and significantly complicated his relations with the ruling circles of the pan-European EU bureaucracy. But, due to the fact that the Hungarian working class was disappointed with both the restoration of capitalism and EU membership, it largely supported the right-wing populist policies of Orbán, who has been the Prime Minister of Hungary since 2010. During Viktor Orbán's term of office, the clericalization of the country was actively promoted: a provision was introduced into the Constitution according to which the Hungarian people are united by God and Christianity. This, in turn, became a prerequisite for the subsequent legislative ban on abortion and same-sex marriage. Under the Orbán government, monuments to Miklós Horthy, during whose reign Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany in World War II, were erected to replace the demolished monuments of Stalinist leaders. The government also passed a series of laws that greatly complicated the lives of the Roma ("gypsy") minority. Widespread use of firearms (supposedly "for self-defense") was allowed, which strengthened informal right-wing extremist militarist organizations, often with a strong anti-Roma orientation. Orbán's traditional support for Vladimir Putin's imperialist foreign policy also cannot be explained solely by the high degree of dependence of the Hungarian economy on the energy resources of the Russian Federation. Both leaders are united by right-wing conservative views promoting "traditional values", "a strong family", the Church, anti-communism and hatred of LGBT people. Similar processes of strengthening extremely conservative public and official discourse are also observed in Poland. For decades, one of the main political forces has been the Law and Justice Party (PiS) which adheres to a national-conservative ideological orientation with strong elements of clericalism and close ties to the Catholic Church. The Law and Justice Party won the elections for the first time in 2005, declaring itself an alternative to the "powerful leftist and liberal elite". According to its ideologues, Poland must free itself not only from the negative legacy of the "socialist past", but also from the dubious values of liberal society acquired during the last two decades. In their political practice, they contrast European and Polish values based on Christian traditions. The two presidents representing this party were Lech Kaczynski and Andrzej Duda. Under strong pressure from the government, on October 22, 2020, the Constitutional Tribunal outlawed a woman's right to abortion in case of a serious defect or incurable disease in the fetus, which accounts for approximately 98% of the total number of abortions in Poland. Unlike its Hungarian right-wing conservative partners, Law and Justice traditionally pursues an anti-Russian policy based on cultivating the memory of the defeat of Tukhachevsky's advancing Red Army in 1920 near Warsaw by Polish troops. As noted above, PiS depends on the strongest Catholic Church in Europe, which during the years of Stalinist rule was perceived by the broad masses as a center of moral resistance to the "communist occupation." As noted above, the growing influence of right-wing populist political forces in the countries of Eastern Europe and the weakness of the socialist political camp have a common cause: the counterrevolutionary legacy of Stalinism, which for many years discredited the left alternative in the eyes of the great masses. There "deformed workers states" were formed not as a result of proletarian socialist revolutions, but as a result of the control and influence of Moscow and the presence in these countries, in fact, of the Soviet occupying army. The Soviet army was not withdrawn from these countries after the end of World War II in agreement with Western imperialism and influenced more directly the establishment of the power of the pro-Moscow "communist" parties. For the broad masses, these regimes, on the one hand, were perceived as occupiers and, on the other, as anti-working class. Consequently, this fact explains to a large extent why after the disappointment with capitalism and the European Union millions of workers came under the influence of and electorally support conservative and right-wing forces, often openly far-right, and not left-wing socialist forces. The weakness of the left political segment in Eastern Europe is obvious. Although the left parties are often represented in parliaments, they fail to present themselves to the working people as a real alternative to both the mainstream of bourgeois power and their radical right-wing opponents. Most of the leftist parties have been transformed into social-democratic leadership precisely out of the old parties with Stalinist tradition. Taking advantage of their bureaucratic past, many of them, in the first years of the restoration of hardcore capitalism, managed to accumulate around them the sentiments of protest and to transform them smoothly from the tasks of the struggle for workers' revolution to parliamentary tasks within the framework of the bourgeois democratic regime. These parties are so strongly integrated and conditioned to official systemic politics as a "left segment" that they have rightly ceased to be perceived by the working class as a real alternative to the dominant capitalist politics. This also applies to the Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej (SLD) party, which has transformed itself into the Nowa Lewica parliamentary party and participates in the ruling coalition with the liberals around the current president of Poland, Donald Tusk. It also applies to the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), which has repeatedly participated in government coalitions and has had its own presidents in Bulgaria. The Hungarian Socialist Party (Magyar Szocialista Párt) and many other similar political projects have a similar history and tradition. Of course, the German parliamentary party "The Left" (Die Linke; Linkspartei), which has its electoral base in East Germany (former German Democratic Republic), is no exception. In the context of these systemic "left-wing" organizations, numerous populist and radical right-wing parties and movements are often perceived as a real alternative to government policy. Right-wing populists transform the righteous hatred of ordinary people towards the EU bureaucracy into isolationist ideas and ideas of a "special path" for their countries. In Eastern Europe, nationalist rhetoric has intensified and is increasingly actively combined with the right-wing anti-immigrant trend. Faced with difficulties in receiving and integrating new waves of immigrants from the Middle and Central East and North Africa, Western European countries are trying to redistribute a significant part of them to Eastern European countries. Right-wing populists are scoring points by criticizing this policy of EU officials and trying to prevent the entry of migrants. Viktor Orbán, whom we have already discussed several times, is a fervent and public opponent of immigration, he is in favor of Hungary introducing quotas for immigrants, but not the European Union. The reason is Hungary's transit location, from where migrants, especially from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, are transported to Western Europe from a refugee camp in the city of Debrecen. Right-wing populists and radicals lie to their voters, offer imaginary alternatives, propose to solve complex and profound problems by means of extremely simplified, schematic solutions and by trying to pit workers against each other. The issue of migration cannot be addressed by isolating each country and closing borders. Global migration waves, as a rule, are associated not only with horrible military conflicts in the Near and Middle East countries, but also with the needs for new and cheap labor in the capitalist economies of European countries, which seek to reduce the costs of production by the wages of their workers united in strong trade unions. Immigrants who are forced to work for miserable incomes and are deprived of their full rights are filling the labor markets of Western Europe. And Eastern Europe will by no means become a kind of exception to the general rules of capitalist economics. A truly progressive approach to immigration and to the problems on which the far right speculates will only be possible with a turn to socialist transformation, through the destruction of capitalism, the introduction of a democratically planned economy and workers' government throughout the world. Ukraine, the struggle for national liberation and the danger of the right-wing Ukraine also belongs territorially to the countries of Eastern Europe, but in the analysis of the political processes taking place in and around it, the category of post-Soviet space becomes even more relevant. For more than 30 years, it has been through the painful processes of separation from the Russian Federation, the realization of its right to self-determination and the development of a free and independent life. Here the legacy of many years of Stalinism shapes most decisively both the extremely weak left-wing socialist movement and the tendency to strengthen right-wing forces. It is one of the few countries in Eastern Europe in which there is not a single left-wing representative or political party with parliamentary representation. In previous materials I have pointed out several times that Russian imperialist propagandism deliberately and repeatedly exaggerates the strength and influence of the right and far right in Ukraine, which, even in their totality, did not win more than 2 or 3% of the votes in the parliamentary and presidential elections. When Russian propaganda falsely labels all Ukrainian people resisting the invasion as Ukrainian Nazis, Ukrainian fascists or bandits, it becomes indispensable to understand the real situation and its origins going back to the history of the struggle for national liberation. In 1938, Stalin expelled from the Komintern the Communist Party of Poland and its component, the Communist Party of Western Ukraine (KPZU). By then, the Comintern, created in 1921 by Lenin in Moscow, had long since capitulated to the Stalinist counterrevolution and the Soviet bureaucracy. The official basis for this exclusion was, as always, "Trotskyism", which penetrated deeply into the KPZU and had to be fought against. The leading figures of the KPZU were shot, according to the decision of the Stalinist courts, for being "collaborators of the Trotskyists and agents of fascism." Of course, this was just another episode of the anarchic Stalinist repressions against sincere and devoted working-class communists. In fact, Leon Trotsky's International carried out its active work among the Western Ukrainian Communists and Stalin, who was terrified of losing control over this Comintern party, decided that it was better to destroy the whole party than to lose decisive control over its assets. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the KPZU was undoubtedly one of the flagships of the national liberation struggle. In the difficult conditions of the Polish occupation of the territory of western Ukraine, the KPZU, as the main left-wing force in the region, waged a struggle for the reunification of the entire Ukrainian people. In the ranks of this party, from the mid-1930s, elements extremely critical of Stalin's policies in Soviet Ukraine became increasingly prominent. The truth about the famine of 1932-1933 and the problems of forced Russification could not be hidden from the workers of western Ukraine. The KPZU constituted the left flank of the national liberation movement, and the right flank consisted of numerous nationalist formations, many of which were ideologically oriented towards one or another version of right-wing radicalism, including Italian fascism and German national socialism. The destruction of the KPZU in 1938-1941 is one of the most serious crimes of Stalinism against the Ukrainian people. A well-known Ukrainian proverb says that "a holy place is never empty". And it is quite obvious that after the Stalinist regime destroyed the communists in Western Ukraine, the banner of the Ukrainian people's national liberation struggle passed to right-wing formations and, above all, to the radical right-wing Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). It was his legacy that became commonplace for many young people after Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, and for the authorities it is part of history subject to official glorification. And, consequently, the whole leftist idea is still associated with Stalinism and its crimes. It was in this political framework that on April 9, 2015 the Ukrainian parliament adopted a package of laws on de-communization. At that time Crimea was already occupied and the war in Donbass was in full swing. Despite the fact that these laws on "communism" exclusively signify the ideological legacy of the Soviet period of history, and the package of laws itself was aimed at putting an end to the activities of the post-Stalinist Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU), for the left-wing forces , even those distanced from the Stalinism of the USSR era, a situation of serious discomfort and even danger arose in the performance of their political work. It is also important to note here that, in connection with the policy of accession to the European Union set out in the Ukrainian Constitution and the recognition of the priority of "European values", all successive Ukrainian authorities, without exception, try to protect the LGBT community from far-right street attacks during their pride parades and public events. Many employees of Western embassies in Kyiv are directly involved in LGBT events to make them safer for Ukrainian participants. LGBT events are protected by reinforced police units, whose total number is many times higher than the total number of right-wing attackers. However, the degree of far-right street violence is still quite significant. It is also interesting to note that, according to official statistics, there has been no trend towards an increase in ethnically and racially motivated crimes in Ukraine for many years. Perhaps these statistics are not entirely accurate, but they still give us some, albeit extremely cautious, optimism in analyzing current trends in Ukrainian society. The growth of right-wing populism in Eastern Europe is associated with the global problem of the popularity of this trend. It can manifest itself in various forms: from religious fundamentalist to right-wing nationalist, from right-wing libertarian to neo-Nazi. All versions are intertwined in providing superficial responses to complex social problems - placing local and global agendas - and in open hostility to the working class and its ideology. Right-wing populism seeks to impose an extremely low level of public education, cultivated by global capital for the segregation of the working masses, their mass dumbing down and deception. The arduous task lies ahead to transmit to the working class and peoples the need to build true socialist left-wing alternatives, radically opposed to all right-wing and populist versions, with their imprint of homophobia, racism, xenophobia and clericalism. "He who walks shall rule the road!" -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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