Development of Parties and Party Systems in ... - lah@sam.sdu.dk

presidentialism gave rise to “floating parties”, i.e. “parties of power” linked to the oligarchy andwith easy access to the media and established shortly before elections. In the case of the CEECs theparties were created top-down, only rarely from voters’ preferences, as these were at best vaguelyformulated. Furthermore, parties were mostly established spontaneously without much knowledgeabout the exact demand for political parties. The programmes and policy statements were mostlyvague and abstract. The absence of clear-cut social interests in society shall be seen in the light ofthe complex triple transformations and the rapidly changing political and economic structures on alllevels of society.Despite weak linkages to civil societies the parties captured a central position after the second freeelections. The political parties remained badly institutionalized, but by no means insignificant.Gradually we were witnessing a professionalization and cartellization of the political scene.Because of party-ist properties they felt tempted to misuse the new won power. Until then, nonpoliticalactors have played an important role and thus to a large extent captured the role otendedfor political parties (”shadow institutionalisation”). In specific “extraordinary crisis situations”, e.g.Hungary in 1995 and the Czech Republic after the 1996 election, a de-democratisation, party-ismand reinforcement of old antidemocratic discourses and anti-politics has been be observed,detrimental to further consolidation of democracy.Contrary to South European countries such as Greece, Spain and Portugal, before 1989 the partiesin the CEECs had neither been able to establish institutionalised structures internally nor inexternally, i.e. in exile. Throughout the region the parties have been marked by the communist past,especially by the last stage of real socialism and the demise of the old system. It has to be taken inconsideration that state socialism developed differently in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.Notions such as ”mature post-totalitarian” and ”national accommodative” have been used about thestate socialist systems in Poland and Hungary, and ”centralist-bureaucratic” and ”frozen posttotalitarian”about the regimes in Czechoslovakia and DDR (Kitschelt et.al., 1999, Linz and Stepan,1996).Furthermore, the “break-through” in Poland in the late 1990s has been named ”pacted transition” or”przemieszczenie” (”common reconstruction”), in Czechoslovakia and DDR the notion ”implosion”has been widespread and in Hungary there has been talked about a ”simple exchange”(“rendszerváltás”) af systems, about gradualism and an almost consensual “evolution” away fromthe old system.At the beginning the work as a politician was often considered as a ”call” or a ”mission”. The newbroad catch-all movement-parties such as Solidarity in Poland and Civic Forum (OF) in the CzechRepublic legitimised themselves by references to the fight against the old system presentingthemselves as broad catch-all parties. A greatest problem was that the day-to-day needs of thepeople became downgraded. The absence of close links to social interests in society was evenconsidered as a virtue, as parties should place themselves above group interests. In the new postcommunistdiscourse the label ”party” was negatively loaded as “parties” for many citizins wereconnected with the former one-party state. Therefore many new “parties” called themselves”movements”, ”centre”, ”forum”, ”alliance”, ”agreement” or ”union”. Thus, the slogan of CivicForum (OF) in the Czech Republic was simply: ”Parties are for the party-people, Civic Forum is forall”.12