12 March 2013

Neil Buckley: East’s 'transition backlash' alerts core EU

The toppling of Bulgaria’s government after protests last month was dismissed by some observers as another backlash against “austerity”. But taken together with the similar fall of a Romanian government and resulting turbulence last year, and Hungary’s defiant adoption this week of constitutional changes that opponents say threaten democratic values, something deeper is going on.

[The Bulgarian] protests [were] not against austerity as such; Bulgaria, a fiscal star performer by EU standards, has not undergone the same dramatic fiscal tightening as some neighbours. Rather, they were against the whole political elite, and a “system” seen to have failed Bulgarians scrabbling to get by on the EU’s lowest average wages.

There are similarities here with Italians’ support for Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement, and disillusionment with the status quo across eurozone periphery members. But there is an additional element in post-communist EU members such as Bulgaria: a rejection of “transition” – the turbulent 20 years of upheavals they went through to get into the union.

“The idea was transition was painful, it was suffering. But now we were supposed to get to a totally different life. We were going to live if not like Germans, at least like Greeks. It never happened”, says Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies think-tank in Sofia...

Mr Krastev suggests that other EU members should make greater efforts to understand what is happening in the ex-communist south-east. They should engage more closely in long-term institution-building in these countries. If not, the transition backlash risks spreading. That includes not just to other ex-communist EU members, but to those, such as other former Yugoslav states, which have not even joined yet – but where the prospect of eventual membership has long been seen as the best guarantee of stability.

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