Hungary’s Socialists dominated political life for decades, governing between 1994-1998 and 2002-2010. But carrying the stigma of their post-communist legacy, they went headlong into turning themselves into a modern and often liberal European left.
“When Hungary’s leftist party turned liberal, it lost most of its voters,” political scientist Balazs Bocskei says. “What they failed to recognise was that Hungarian society was not ready for the Western-style liberalism.”
Others take a more nuanced view. Istvan Hiller, a former education and culture minister, believes the Socialists did a reasonably good job during those two decades. He sees the problems in the fragmenting of the left from 2011, when former prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany split from the Socialists and created his own Democratic Coalition.
From this moment, “left-leaning voters were scattered among a variety of parties,” Hiller tells BIRN. He believes there are at least 20-25 per cent of Hungarians who would vote for a credible leftist alternative – if one existed.
Bocskei, too, points to the left’s failure to offer a coherent alternative. “While they tended to compete in their Orban-bashing, they effectively lost all their social network,” he says.
A similar trajectory has played out in Poland. For much of the 1990s and early 2000s, the left – through the post-communist Democratic Alliance – was also one of the central pillars of the political system. But that dominance collapsed abruptly 20 years ago.
“The Polish left has never really recovered from the blow dealt by the [Leszek] Miller government in 2001-2005,” Jaroslaw Flis, a sociologist at the University of Cracow, tells BIRN.
The implosion, Flis argues, was not primarily ideological but political: corruption scandals, internal fighting and organisational breakdown fractured the movement, in a pattern familiar across Europe. What followed was a long sequence of reinventions – new parties, new leaders, brief surges of momentum – but little durable consolidation.
By the mid-2010s, the consequences were visible in voter behaviour. “At one point, more self-identified left-wing voters were backing Civic Platform (PO) than the left itself,” Flis noted.
Poland’s liberal centre had, in effect, become the default political home for much of the progressive electorate, further marginalising the left.
Yet in 2023, the left managed to return to parliament and even into government as a junior partner in Donald Tusk’s ruling coalition. The coalition’s centre of gravity, however, remains fundamentally liberal rather than social democratic, making it difficult to push a social-democratic agenda, Dorota Olko, an MP from the New Left (Nowa Lewica) notes.
“When something succeeds it becomes the government’s success, and when it fails it is seen as the left’s failure,” Olko says.
Additionally, the left-wing social base remains narrow and heavily urban. “The left’s electorate is concentrated in the largest cities. It is, in a sense, an empathetic patriciate,” Flis comments.
In Czechia, the collapse was even more dramatic. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the Czech Social Democrats commanded about a third of the electorate, while the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM) continued to attract, in the two decades following the Velvet Revolution, between 10 and 20 per cent of voters.
Fast-forward to last October’s general election, when a loose electoral alliance of left-wing parties including the Communists and Social Democrats, failed to even reach the 5 per cent threshold to get into parliament, marking a demise “unprecedented in the country’s modern history,” observed Patrik Eichler, head of the Masaryk Democratic Academy.
Czechia has followed the wider European trend of the fall of the political left since the 2010s, argues Sean Hanley, associate professor in Central and Eastern European politics at University College London, with many self-reinforcing factors at play, from the hollowing out of working-class communities to voters’ lingering blame against left-wing parties which were in power during and in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis.
Both parties had long been plagued by internal divisions and leadership fights, financial difficulties, and an inability – or unwillingness – to attract new voters beyond their traditional, older, rural electorate.
“In the Czech Republic, the left is mainly focused on finding new ways of digging its own grave,” argued journalist and commentator Petr Bittner, adding that their votes have been hoovered up by “those who offer them the illusion of dignity without any real redistribution of wealth.”