Left behind By the Left, Voting for the Populist Right

The populist right continues to thrive, largely due to its ability to attract former core working-class voters from left-of-center parties. East-Central Europe is a populist right hotspot, providing key insights into how these parties construct a durable social base. This study contributes to the global debate on the social foundations of right-wing populism by analyzing Hungary as a strategic case. It offers unique mixed-method evidence demonstrating the interplay of demand and supply, showing how the mainstream center-left’s strategic errors enabled the rise of radical-right populism. First, it conducts a novel quantitative content analysis of the Hungarian Socialist Party’s programmatic documents (party manifestos and parliamentary speeches). The analysis reveals an increasing neglect of workers and a shift toward the right in social and economic policy. Second, the paper analyzes a unique town-level dataset on long-term economic and demographic trends, alongside data on vote share shifts before the watershed 2010 election when the Hungarian Socialist Party collapsed and the radical populist right Jobbik party burst onto the scene. The analysis shows that voters in towns hit hardest by deindustrialization and rising mortality in the 1990s felt abandoned by the Socialist Party and turned toward Jobbik. The study also shows that Jobbik was able to mobilize voters against the Roma minority in towns experiencing bigger shocks in the 1990s but the Roma population share itself is not a robust predictor of Jobbik’s success. The findings are robust against a host of demographic, economic, and cultural controls. Overall, the study shows that radical-right populism’s success hinges on the mainstream left’s failure to retain support in areas facing long-term socioeconomic decline.