Populist watch.

The article examines a populist resurgence in central Europe. Foreign governments have pressed Lithuania to clean house before it joined NATO last week and the European Union (EU) in May. Rolandas Paksas, the scandal-swamped president of Lithuania, was dismissed by a parliamentary vote after 15 months in office. A rising protest vote in Poland has turned a small-farmers' movement, Samoobrona, into a leading political party. An unreformed Communist Party is gaining ground in the Czech Republic. In Romania, which hopes to join the EU in 2007, the xenophobic Greater Romania Party enjoys not only popularity but respectability. Even Slovenia, the richest of this year's EU entrants, voted overwhelmingly in a referendum on April 4th against restoring civic rights to members of ethnic minorities denied citizenship without cause after independence in 1991.