Central Europe's populist resurgence offers warning to US Democrats

Democrats in the United States are breathing easier after a string of victories in November 2025: New York City, Virginia, New Jersey, and a California ballot measure that restores congressional redistricting powers. The mood is one of relief, even optimism, that the Trump era might be receding. But a glance eastward, toward the Visegrád capitals, suggests the celebration may be premature. In Prague, Bratislava and Warsaw, right-wing populist forces that were supposedly buried by mass protests and electoral defeats have clawed their way back, in some cases within just a few years.

Babiš returns in Prague

The most recent example is the Czech Republic. In the October 2025 parliamentary election, Andrej Babiš's ANO movement finished as the largest bloc, positioning the billionaire former prime minister to return to office at the head of a coalition that includes a far-right anti-immigration party and a fringe anti-environmental grouping. Four years earlier, Babiš was driven out by the largest street demonstrations since 1989, fuelled by conflict-of-interest allegations involving EU subsidies and his agrochemical conglomerate Agrofert. The protests, known as 'Milion chvilek pro demokracii' (A Million Moments for Democracy), drew direct parallels to the 'No Kings' demonstrations that have recently unfolded across American cities. Yet the anger that powered those protests proved insufficient to build a durable alternative. The centre-right coalition that replaced Babiš fractured over energy prices, inflation and the pace of green transition, leaving a vacuum that ANO filled with a campaign focused on cost-of-living relief and sovereignty.

Fico's pivot in Bratislava

Slovakia offers an even starker illustration. Robert Fico, who resigned in 2018 after the murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée sparked nationwide outrage, returned as prime minister in October 2023. His Smer party won on a platform of social conservatism, opposition to military aid for Ukraine, and a promise to restore ties with Moscow. Fico's appearance as a guest speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland earlier this year underscored the transatlantic coordination of the populist right. Since returning to office, his government has halted arms shipments to Kyiv, threatened to veto EU sanctions on Russia, and moved to overhaul the public broadcaster RTVS, steps the European Commission has flagged as potential rule-of-law violations. The speed with which a politician forced out by a democratic uprising could return, and then align his country with the Kremlin's orbit, has unsettled Brussels and Western capitals alike.

Poland's presidential rebound

In Poland, the Law and Justice party (PiS) lost the October 2023 parliamentary election to a coalition led by Donald Tusk's Civic Platform, ending eight years of nationalist-conservative rule that had brought Warsaw into repeated conflict with the EU over judicial independence and media freedom. Yet less than two years later, PiS-backed candidate Karol Nawrocki narrowly defeated Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski in the June 2025 presidential election. The presidency in Poland carries significant veto power and influence over foreign policy and security appointments. Nawrocki's victory means Tusk's government now faces a head of state capable of blocking legislative reforms, including those needed to unlock the remaining €35 billion in EU recovery funds frozen under the rule-of-law conditionality mechanism. As Anne Applebaum wrote in The Atlantic, the result confirmed that 'all elections are now existential', small swings decide the nature of the state, the independence of the courts, the trajectory of democracy itself.

The structural drivers: deindustrialisation and the new cleavage

What connects these three cases? Albin Sybera, a Czech political commentator, identifies two common ingredients: polarisation and the failure of liberal parties to address economic displacement. The collapse of traditional manufacturing across the former Eastern Bloc, and across the American Rust Belt, has left communities without the stable, unionised jobs that once anchored social democratic or Christian democratic voting blocs. In the Czech Republic, the automotive sector, which accounts for roughly 9% of GDP and employs over 180,000 people directly, faces existential disruption from the shift to electric vehicles. Slovakia's economy is similarly dependent on car production, with plants operated by Volkswagen, Kia, Jaguar Land Rover and Stellantis. Poland's industrial heartlands in Silesia have shed coal-mining jobs faster than new sectors have emerged. Eurostat's industrial production figures show that manufacturing employment in the Visegrád four has stagnated or declined since 2015 even as output has risen, a pattern mirrored in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The political consequence, as Steven Levitsky of Harvard University argues, is a fundamental realignment. 'Politics in most western democracies is now primarily cleaved along what you can call cosmopolitan versus populist lines,' he said. 'We call it left-right, but it's urban-liberal, secular on the one hand, and more rural religious, ethno-nationalist on the other.' This cleavage cuts across traditional class lines. In the Czech election, ANO won its strongest support in the Moravian-Silesian region, a former industrial stronghold of the social democrats. In Slovakia, Fico dominated the east and north, areas that once voted for the post-communist left. In Poland, Nawrocki's margin came from the eastern 'Poland B', smaller towns and rural counties where PiS's social transfers, including the 800+ złoty monthly child benefit, remain popular despite the fiscal strain they impose.

The ideology gap

Levitsky goes further. 'If you look at all the major political forces in western democracies, the only one with any real ideology, any real passion, any real project, is the far right,' he said. 'The far-left, center-left, liberal-center, Christian Democrats, none of them have a real project. They will unite in their opposition to the far right. But I can't think of a social democratic party in the world that has people getting up out of bed early Saturday morning to work for the party.' This asymmetry matters. Populist movements offer a narrative, a restored nation, a defended culture, a reclaimed sovereignty, that centrist technocratic management cannot match. The Czech campaign illustrated the point: Babiš's slogan 'Česko dřív' (Czechia First) echoed Trump's 'America First' with deliberate precision. Fico's 'Slovensko prv' (Slovakia First) and PiS's 'Polska wielka' (Great Poland) operate in the same register. These are not policy platforms; they are identity projects.

Democracy as a luxury good?

Eric Rubin, a former US ambassador who served in posts across Central Europe, offers a darker interpretation. 'One of the things I've learned from 40 years as an American diplomat is that some of the basic assumptions we grew up with are not necessarily true,' he said. 'The assumption, that people, given a choice, will prefer democracy, they want to elect their own leaders, they want freedom of speech and all the other freedoms, as a default, that's probably true but there are trade-offs. If you ask most people in the world, would you give away some freedom for economic security or prosperity or national security, I think in most countries the answer is yes.' This pragmatism helps explain why voters who participated in mass protests against corruption or authoritarian drift can, a few years later, vote the same politicians back into office. The protests were expressive; the vote is instrumental. When inflation hits 15%, as it did in the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 2022-23, the calculus shifts.

The anti-incumbency trap

There is a third factor, one that should worry Democrats as much as Republicans. 'The generalized unpopularity of incumbents hits everybody, not just the liberals,' Levitsky noted. 'It hits the far right. It affected Trump in 2020. It's going to affect the Republicans in 2026 and 2028.' The post-Covid electoral cycle has been brutal for governing parties across the democratic world. In the EU, only a handful of incumbents have survived national elections since 2021. But this cuts both ways. If Democrats retake the House in 2026 and the White House in 2028, they will own the economy, the border, the culture wars, and the inevitable backlash. The European pattern suggests that a populist right defeated at the polls does not disappear; it waits, amplifies grievances, and returns when the new government fails to deliver visible improvement. The Czech, Slovak and Polish oppositions all assumed that removing the populist would reset the system. Instead, they inherited the structural problems, energy dependence, demographic decline, industrial transition, that the populists had exploited.

Hungary: the model and its limits

Viktor Orbán remains the exception that proves the rule. Since 2010, Fidesz has won four consecutive supermajorities, using what the European Parliament has described as a 'hybrid regime of electoral autocracy', gerrymandered constituencies, a media landscape dominated by government-aligned oligarchs, and constitutional changes that entrench executive power. Trump has repeatedly cited Orbán as a model. Yet even Orbán faces a genuine contest in spring 2026. Polls consistently show Fidesz trailing the united opposition, led by former insider Péter Magyar, whose Tisza Party has capitalised on a corruption scandal involving the president's pardon of a man convicted of covering up child abuse in a state-run orphanage. The Hungarian case demonstrates that institutional capture can extend a populist's tenure well beyond its democratic expiry date, but it also shows that no system is immune to scandal, economic shock, or the sheer fatigue of one-man rule.