EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL EUROPEANIZATION IN EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE: THE NEW POPULIST PARTIES AND DECONSOLIDATION IN THE 2010S.

The main message of this paper is that there are two periods of Europeanization and Democratization in the ECE political systems with a transitory grey zone in the 2000s. They can be termed as the periods of "permissive tolerance" and "increasing disappointment" seen from the side of the ECE populations, and the periods of "formalities" and "alienation" in Europeanization from the side of the ruling elites. This paper tries to describe these two periods of the political systems in general and the party systems in particular. The first party systems of the young ECE democracies have collapsed in the 2010s due to the failure of the catching up process in the last Quarter-Century that has been aggravated by the effects of the global crisis. This paper argues that the decline of democracy in ECE has been accompanied with the rise of the second party system. The critical elections in the 2010s have also meant the change in the party system towards the dominance of the populist parties. The new dominant parties of the last decade represent also some kind of the political reaction to the global crisis management, since they express the dissatisfaction of the large masses suffering from the long-term effects of global crisis in the 2010s. The populist parties in ECE have usually become the governing mainstream parties, and they have completed the state capture in the form of democracy capture leading to the deconsolidation of the ECE political systems. The new wave of populism in ECE that has produced the "populist eruption" in the region, therefore this situation necessitates the elaboration of the comprehensive conceptual framework of the ECE new political systems based on the duality of the external and internal Europeanization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]