Makarkin Alexey Владимирович – Professor, 1 vice-president of the Center for political technologies
In all countries of Central and South-Eastern Europe, there is a repeated experience of opposition forces coming to power in parliamentary elections. Only in three countries – Albania, Hungary and Serbia – the ruling party in power by 2022 won three consecutive parliamentary elections before. Electoral processes in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe in 2014–2022 demonstrate numerous examples of the «coexistence» of a president and a parliamentary majority belonging to different political forces: this is relevant for both semi-presidential and parliamentary (except Hungary) republics. In 2014–2022, in semi-presidential republics, the phenomenon of «coexistence» of president and prime minister did not occur only in Serbia, and in Poland it lasted only a few months. Although in a number of countries the «coexistence» was accompanied by acute conflicts, in most cases the political process took place without the use of the instrument of impeachment, and its use in Albania and Romania proved unsuccessful – in the first case, theimpeachment failed due to the position of the Constitutional Court, in the second – due to the results of the referendum. In some cases, the electoral behavior of citizens is influenced by the actual demarcation along the «urban-rural» line. Large cities in some countries (Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic) vote more actively for more liberal pro-European candidates, while small towns and villages vote for more conservative and Eurosceptic ones. At the same time, the promotion of new populist Eurosceptic parties is active but local, with only a limited impact on the political systems of each country. Euroscepticism has significantly corrected the optimistic expectations of supporters of European integration, but has not won.
Central Europe, Eastern Europe, South-Eastern Europe, parliamentary republic, semi-presidential republic, elections in Europe.
Download text