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

antipolitics and reinforcement of antidemocratic discourses could be observed, detrimental forconsolidation of the polical arena and the new-won democracy.1.4. Stages of party and party system developmentThat leads us to mapping out the different stages of party development. As noted above, parties inthe CEECs were established in communist one-party-systems in crisis and decay. The first stage ofpost-communism was marked by extraordinary politics, extrication, political crafting and transitionanomie and functional as well as government overload. The parliaments almost became “lawmaking machines”. The new political parties were embryonic ”sofa-parties” and proto-partiesmarked by internal splits and several veto-group factions. The main problem was to find newconstituencies and political issues on which to compete. Political strategists simply did not knowwhat the electorate would tolerate be way of hardship (Innes, 2002:88). Thus the demand ofpolitical parties were difficult to dertermine. As noted by Edmund Mokrzycki the new politicalleaders tended to base their calculations on simplified holistic and radical constructions andneoliberal utopia believing in a harmonic and natural order after in four decades having beenharassed by marxist-leninist propaganda 5 .Under the then prevailing extraordinary politics and transition anomie the party systems, that meansinteraction between parties, were not sufficiently developed as interaction mostly took place insidethe party movements. Due to low party institutionalisation political entrepreneurship and politicalcrafting played a prominent role. Most parties were forced to “look inwards”, secure higherinstitutionalization and elite-cohesion. There tended to be few striking differences between the partyprogrammes. The historical parties had to to organize themselves almost from scratch and wereforced to find a new identity and reach a ”compromise” between the past and the present, certainlyno easy tasks.Figure 2: Stages of party developmentYear1989 new movement so-calledcatch all movement proto-parties“re-invention” of old historical partiespost-communist successor parties1990 “wars in the top”5 Edmund Mokrzycki, “Kapitalizm Oswojony”, Gazeta Wyborcza 11-12 August, 2001:10.14