When the Hungarian government erected barbed-wire fences in response to the European migration crisis in the fall of 2015, political observers began to take a much closer look at the state of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. What they found was a resurgent Radical Right—particularly in Hungary where Jobbik (Movement for a Better Hungary) had been winning 20% of the vote in national elections for over a decade—as well as a marked erosion of democratic institutions. But as Andrea Pirro rightly notes in this penetrating book, scholars who really wanted to understand the Radical Right in Central and Eastern Europe had relatively few places to turn. For while the literature on these political parties in Western Europe is both massive and expanding, parties like Jobbik, Ataka (in Bulgaria), and the Slovak National Party (SNS) have not received nearly the same attention. The Populist Right in Central and Eastern Europe delivers on its promise to outline the core features of these parties and assess their political influence. It also raises, though does not answer, the question of whether populism erodes democratic institutions in regions—Central and Eastern Europe in this case, but perhaps also Latin America—where democracy itself is of relatively recent vintage.

Like most books in the now indispensable series Routledge Studies in Extremism and Democracy, this book will be of primary interest to scholars and graduate students. The analysis centers on three questions: 1) What is the ideological core of populist radical right parties in Central and Eastern Europe? 2) What accounts for their electoral performance? And 3) how much influence do they have? Pirro is best on the first question, and the central value of this study is to chart the ideological features and development of Jobbik, Ataka, and the SNS. Not surprisingly, nativism emerges as a core feature of the populist Radical Right in Central and Eastern Europe, and the author’s examination of party documents and other forms of discourse will be exceedingly useful to future scholars working on this topic. Another central contribution is his discussion of clericalism and irredentism, as these are ideological components that do seem to differentiate Central and Eastern radical right parties from their Western counterparts.

When it comes to electoral performance, the lack of a clear guiding question or theoretical puzzle leads Pirro to adopt a complex model (one drawing from both demand- and supply-side arguments) to gain analytical leverage. This seems like somewhat of a missed opportunity, for while Jobbik has consolidated itself in Hungarian politics Ataka may very well prove to be a double flash in the pan. There might have been other ways of increasing variation on the dependent variable short of including other country cases.

Pirro is to be applauded, however, for tackling the toughest, yet probably most important, open question in the study of the Radical Right: How much influence does it really have? Opinions on this matter range from “practically none”—the Radical Right is a political irritant more than a meaningful player—to “overwhelming”—the Radical Right is shaping the political agenda in advanced industrial democracies. It is thus important to move the debate beyond these unrealistic maximalist alternatives. But measuring political influence—both direct and indirect—turns out to be tricky, and successful efforts are few and far between. Pirro certainly improves on the all-or-nothing approach to the question, yet his findings are not terribly clear. Relying on the Chapel Hill expert surveys, in addition to an expert survey he conducted himself, he charts changes in the positions of other parties on specific issue areas (ethnic minorities, for example) as a response to the Populist Right. While this strategy is sensible, the results are difficult to interpret and do not stand out well from the numerous figures representing changes in party positions. I am left wondering what terms like “interaction” and “confounding” effects really mean in this context. I am also left wondering if there are other ways of documenting political influence, such as analyzing the role (or lack thereof) of populist radical right parties in creating, blocking, or passing specific pieces of legislation. This would involve a different research strategy, one that would probably require more detailed examination of the policymaking process, but one that might very well correspond better to the complex picture presented by the author.

Pirro, writing in 2014, ended the book with the prescient observation that “populist radical right parties seek to redefine the rules of the liberal-democratic game, envisioning the establishment of a populist and exclusionary variant of democracy” (p. 200). Three years later, one can make a plausible case that Hungary has left the liberal-democratic orbit and is rushing toward competitive authoritarianism. Yet it is not Jobbik that has been leading the assault on Hungarian democracy, but Viktor Orban and his party FIDESZ—which was once thought to be a run-of-the-mill mainstream conservative party. It is interesting to question the degree to which Jobbik’s presence in Hungarian politics facilitated Orban’s construction of, in his own words, an illiberal state. Given that Orban’s moves have been imitated by other governments in the region, most notably in Poland, the connection between populists and would-be Putins is worth thinking about more deeply. It is one of many fruitful lines of questioning that Pirro raises in this useful and compelling study.