Social Democracy in East-Central Europe: Success by Default?

In the parliamentary elections of 2001, Poland's ex-communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) won more than three times the number of votes than any other party, registering its best result since 1989 and simultaneously delivering a crushing blow to the ruling Solidarity-led coalition, which not only lost power but also failed to win any seats in the lower house of parliament. If at the time of communism's collapse someone had gazed into a crystal ball and predicted that Solidarity's heirs would suffer from almost continuous disarray and the SLD would emerge as the country's most successful political party, he would have been dismissed as a crank. For a number of reasons, ranging from the country's strong religious traditions, to a political culture that saw the communist system and its servants as a basically alien force, to a long history of political contestation of communism, culminating in the rise of the Solidarity movement in 1980, Poland was the one East European country in which such a result must have seemed particularly unlikely. Further, given Poland's singularly dismal economic performance under communist rule (hardly conducive to nostalgic feelings), as well as the country's relative success with market reforms in the 1990s, one could not easily explain the ex-communist left's electoral gains as simply the result of a backlash against the consequences of economic transition.

The SLD's growing strength (see Table 1) is thus the big puzzle of Polish politics, with clear implications for the rest of the former Eastern Bloc. It suggests that the ex-communist left may well enjoy some advantages that put it ahead of its rivals even when it competes in what would seem to be a culturally and economically inhospitable environment. But the SLD, unlike most other ex-communist parties, has done much to recast itself in a social democratic mold. This essay explores whether the SLD has been successful because of its ideological transformation, or whether the sources of its success lie elsewhere. It examines several alternative explanations, but in the end comes back to the issue of ideology. Ideological positioning is indeed the key to the puzzle, but not in the way it may appear at first glance. The sources of the SLD's electoral strength lie not in its social democracy, but in its use of symbolic and cultural divisions around religion, national identity, and the communist past.

Social Democracy as Adaptation Strategy

The substantial literature that exists on communist successor parties has focused much of its attention on distinguishing among the different political paths pursued by these organizations since 1989, seeing these paths as political-adaptation strategies that have been of crucial importance to the parties' electoral successes and failures. ¹ A particularly useful typology, developed by Ziblatt and also used in somewhat modified form by Ishiyama and Bozoki, identifies three main strategies. ² First, some organizations have remained true to their Marxist-Leninist heritage, especially in the sense of rejecting market-oriented reforms and retaining much of the rhetorical style and iconography of the former era. Perhaps the best example of this type is the Communist party of Bohemia and Moravia, which in its electoral campaigns throughout the 1990s painted the Czech Republic's economic reforms as a dreadful mistake and persisted with the use of red stars, hammer-and-sickle emblems, and references to Marx and Lenin on its posters and other election materials. Within the former East Germany, the Party of Democratic Socialism has pursued a similar strategy, though with an emphasis on the special context of German unification.

The second type of communist successor party covers those organizations that have sought to distance themselves from some aspects of their past, downplaying the "internationalist" aspects of Marxism-Leninism and replacing them with "national-patriotic" themes. Perhaps the best example of this type is the Communist party of the Russian Federation, which has...