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elections. They feared that touching controversial and unpopular topics would not boost
their popularity and would rather bring more harm than profit and would give ample am-
munition to the opposition. Ruling politicians often developed a tendency to treat each
criticism as malicious attack motivated by shadowy interests. When each contact became
a malicious attack in their eyes, one often-reached conclusion was that all communication
was useless. Or the reason could have been tinged with arrogance when a preponderance
in power prevented parties feeling obliged to explain their actions to people – all the more
in cases where they had something to hide, such as a case of corruption or a neglect of the
public interest.
The Bulgarian, Romanian and Macedonian cases are especially illustrative of an intimate
relationship between the communication and political conduct of those in power. There
is always a much smaller chance that the press will praise a government’s achievements,
if the ruling parties are generally perceived as corrupt and self-serving. Also, for govern-
ments it is extremely difficult to defend their actions and justify their motivations when
members of parliament and parties backing the cabinet and interacting with people on
the grassroots level are seen as selfish and predatory political entrepreneurs. It is impos-
sible to appeal to people’s reason and patience in judging government performance, when
those who appeal are seen as extracting profit from their elected office. The Bulgarian case
provides an example of how news related to the misconduct of the ruling right wiped out
completely other policy-related topics. The Lithuanian case describes various “popularity
wars” between governments and the caucuses backing them in parliament that damaged
the right’s image.
A typical malaise affecting the pro-reform right (for example, in Poland and Lithuania)
was that the state of their public relations (often in spite of abundant resources) embodied
their inability to sell their achievements and to resist the fact that that negative aspects
of their rule dominated the press. According to Lánczi’s account, Fidesz in Hungary had
acute problems with its image (whatever the reasons were) which were not tackled prop-
erly by the party. It failed to avoid the impression of being a radical force polarizing society
and the fear related to these concerns mobilized many people to vote against Fidesz. In
Poland and Lithuania, the ruling right was utterly unable to defend its reforms against
negative coverage which dominated the press.
Frequently, the right had to face a historically and culturally determined dominance of
the left in media – both public and private. Such a situation may trigger the temptation
to control public media to counteract this “natural advantage” of the rival, as was the
case in Hungary or Macedonia. On the contrary, in the Polish case Matraszek states the
right’s “failure to control the media, at least in the sense of ensuring fair and balanced
reporting” became a major problem, as it missed the chance to influence the composi-
tion of the public media supervisory bodies, leaving them staffed by the nominees of
their predecessors.
To conclude this section, it is necessary to note that there are always many reasons for
problems of incumbents in communicating their actions to the public. In the post-Com-
munist region, apart from inexperience with political public relations, there were two ad-
ditional ones – contempt of power holders for the ideas of responsiveness and account-
ability and their rational effort to conceal their corrupt practices.
