중동부유럽

In the following article we make an analysis of populism in South-East Europe, taking Bulgaria and Romania as examples. In this regard, we present arguments in favour of the idea that the populist phenomenon has grown in the two countries, as observed by other researchers, with the difference that in the case of Bulgaria populist parties had already reached power in 2001, whereas in Romania, they had not reached the same level of access by then. Simultaneously, we account for the correlations between decreasing participation in elections and the growing number of votes for populist parties in the two countries in the framework of the severe economic crisis of the last decade. Finally, the article intends to clarify several aspects regarding forced classifications of parties in the South-East Europe area in general and in the two studied countries specifically, by certain researchers who are themselves involved in ideological partisan disputes on one side or the other of the political environment in the area. The article draws several basic conclusions and makes some proposals for diminishing the populist phenomenon among political parties in South-East Europe in the present and in the possible future.