wh y w e l o s t
138
when as a result of their controversial years in power, they temporarily yielded their status
as the dominant party on the right to the Liberal Union.
On the surface, the competitive pattern of
Macedonia
reminds one of alternation of mod-
erate leftist and rightist blocks seen in some other countries in the region. This contest,
however, in Macedonia takes place in an environment hardly favorable to programmatic
competition. Moreover, it is troubled by ethnic problems. From the beginning, VMRO, a
historical melding of nationalism and anti-Communism, dominated the right pole of the
party system, even though, as Andrej Lepavcov mentions, it did so mostly without explicit
declarations of allegiance to a set of traditionally center-right principles. It may be that
VMRO’s position on the right was determined by that of its main rival, the post-Commu-
nist SDSM, and its social democratic orientation.
VMRO owed its rise to power in 1998 to the resentment by voters of the Socialist colo-
nization of the state and the exploitation of its resources, privatization-related corruption
and the alleged involvement of the ruling establishment in and benefiting from pyramid
schemes that impoverished a large part of the population. The country also faced a broad
economic crisis, even though not as acute as it was in the cases of Bulgaria or Romania. As
many of these practices were not unknown for VMRO in power either, it seems that they
are the major driving force of the Macedonian power alternation, which suggests a serious
lack of programmatic competition.
In
Poland
the conflict of the post-Communist versus post-Solidarity parties has domi-
nated the scene. Within the post-Solidarity right, there was a Western liberal wing (UW)
and a large and patchy Christian-national one. These two never actually fought the serious
battle of the right; instead they were involved in a complicated series of cohabitations and
coalitions (
See
Bakke, Elisabeth and Nick Sitter, “Patterns of Stability. Party Competition
and Strategy in Central Europe since 1989,”
Party Politics
11:1, pages 243-263.)
Although unstable and disunited, the right in Poland managed to dominate the government
and to introduce economic reforms until 1993. The 1993 election victory of the post-Com-
munist left showed the limits of ‘tinkering’ and gave impetus to reformation of the rela-
tionships of various right-of-center groups, in which an umbrella-like grouping of loosely
organized ties among parties on their right was chosen. This was embodied in the Solidarity
Election Action (AWS), which turned out to be instrumental in the consolidation of elec-
toral support for the right and eventually brought it to power after the 1997 elections.
The right owed its victory exactly to this “creation of an appropriate political vehicle,” as
Marek Matraszek puts it, and to the good result of its potential ally UW, rather than to
its predecessor’s poor performance. In fact, SLD did not suffer a crushing defeat in 1997;
it actually increased its share of votes. AWS was clever enough, however, to make use of
the natural unpopularity of the incumbent government and of several incompetent steps
towards the end of its tenure to win by a small but extremely important margin of the
vote. The ‘political vehicle’ chosen by the Polish right in 1997, however, would later play a
prominent role in the explanation of AWS failures in power.
Romania
is an example of laborious construction of a viable, moderate center-right – an
undertaking, which some argue is hardly finished even today. The two historic parties,
PNL and PNTCD, declared their right-of-center orientation in 1990. In the form of an
early CDR, they faced various reincarnations of the Communist party (FSN, FDSN,
