Varieties of Dependency, Varieties of Populism: Neoliberalism and the Populist Countermovements in the Visegrad Four

The rise of populism has cast doubt on the sustainability of the marriage of liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism. There is an urgent need to understand how neoliberal developmental bottlenecks foster populist social coalitions. This essay analyses how the combination of dependent development and various structures of dependency governance have contributed to different levels of socio-economic disintegration, engendering different populist countermovements in Central and Eastern Europe. These processes fostered exclusionary neoliberal populism with strong illiberalism in Hungary, welfare chauvinist populism with weak illiberalism in Poland, technocratic neoliberal populism without illiberalism in the Czech Republic and entrenched neoliberal populism with contained illiberalism in Slovakia.