Two Types of Presidentialization in the Party Politics of Central Eastern Europe 1

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1 Two Types of Presidentialization in the Party Politics of Central Eastern Europe 1 Vít Hloušek 2 Abstract: Central Eastern European party politics offers a good example of the trend towards centralizing internal party decision-making, as well as encouraging strong personalities in the role of party leader. This trend is visible in all three major spheres of party activity: election campaigning, the internal organisation of parties, and governmental politics. This paper focuses on the party systems of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia to demonstrate that there are actually two processes of presidentialization that occur in party politics. On the one hand, the role of the leader is gaining importance in more traditional, well-established parties such as the Civic and Social Democrats in the Czech Republic, and Fidesz in Hungary. On the other, a perhaps even clearer presidentialization process is evident in the emergence of new protest parties focused around strong personalities that often make no attempt to establish and maintain a more complex internal party organisation. Keywords: presidentialization of party politics, party organization, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia Introduction Our aim in this article is to evaluate and provide an overview of characteristics that are specific to the presidentialization of party politics. To do so, we use the countries of Central Europe, and show that the trend towards presidentialization has been gaining momentum, with an impact on both long-established, traditional parties and those more recently established. The article is structured to correspond to this objective. First, the concept of presidentialization is outlined. This is followed by a discussion of other concepts related to the centralization of power and decisionmaking systems within political parties in Central and Eastern Europe. The sections to follow provide a stepwise analysis of presidentialization, with a primary focus on party leadership. In addition, attention is given to electoral politics and, in the final discussion, governmental politics, as well. 1 The paper was supported by the Masaryk University project "Europe in a Changing International Environment" (MUNI/A/1316/2014). The author would like to thank Katarína Deáková a Vratislav Havlík for their help in researching Hungarian primary sources and Lubomír Kopeček for consultation on the draft manuscript. 2 Vít Hloušek (1977), Associate Professor at the Department of International Relations and European Studies, and Director of the International Institute of Political Science at the Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. He focuses on contemporary history and comparative political science of European countries. Contact: hlousek@fss.muni.cz

2 Presidentialization as a Trend in European Politics Presidentialization as a concept is a significant analytical tool for use in describing a trend which has seen the importance and power of leaders grow in contemporary party politics. Presidentialization sees this trend not as an outgrowth of changes to the constitutional and legal framework, nor to the electoral system, but rather as the result of informal reinforcement of the role played by leaders under the existing set of rules. The classic definition, put forth by Poguntke and Webb (2007: 1), places the emphasis on the fact that presidentialization denominates a process by which regimes are becoming more presidential in their actual practice without, in most cases, changing their formal structure that is their regime type. Empirically, under the presidentialization process, the role of the leader, the head of the executive in most European countries, the prime minister is reinforced in three areas: power resources, leadership autonomy, 3 and the electoral process (Poguntke Webb 2007:5). Our chief interest is in party politics, and here presidentialization involves a focus on reinforcing leader autonomy (the party politics sphere). Also of interest is the role played by leaders in election campaigns and in devising political party strategies (the electoral sphere), and on reinforcing the role played by party leaders in the government politics sphere under Sartori s model of parlimentarism, in which the prime minister plays an important role (Sartori 1994). 4 In the presidentialization process, party leaders concentrate power, media attention, and decision-making in their own person, at the expense of parties as collective actors aggregating the interests of the membership base. This dampens political discussion within the party and in general, in an environment in which the importance of political marketing is growing, as is the professionalization and personalization (i.e., the Americanization ) of election campaigns. 5 The result is that the professionalization of party politics must thus be perceived within a context in which cartel-type political party organizations prevail (Katz Mair 1995; Kopecký 1995; Detterbeck 2005), along with the developing entrepreneurial issue parties (Harmel - Svåsand 1993). In both cases, there is pressure to push the role played by the membership base into the background and concentrate party decision-making in the hands of a restricted group. The Concept of the Presidentialization of Political Parties and the Characteristics of Central Europe This concept originally grew out of a combination of theory and the empirical observation of party development in Western Europe, but it can come in our opinion, be used to analyse the parties and party systems of Central and Eastern Europe with great effect. A number of factors which have 3 In Central and Western European countries, this process is also reinforced by the role of the government as gatekeeper between union and national politics that empirically weakens legislation for the benefit of the executive. Research into the Europization of national politics focuses on this dimension (Ladrech 2002; Carter et al. 2007; Raunio O Brennan 2007; Poguntke 2008), here we will leave the EU as a factor that generally reinforces the presidentialization of party politics aside, because our focus is on its manifestations in the Central-European context. 4 Poguntke and Web (2007: 5) speak of the executive, party, and electoral faces of presidentialization. Also see Poguntke et al But empirical research shows that personalisation does not have necessarily impact all countries in Western (Kriesi 2011), Central and Eastern Europe (Flacco 2014) to the same degree.

3 played a leading role in the presidentialization of politics in Western Europe are having an even stronger impact in Central and Eastern Europe; they include influences traceable directly to party functioning of party competition, such as the weak anchoring of cleavages and the relatively low stability of party competition paradigms, along with the low levels of party institutionalization and resulting greater electoral volatility, the predominance of cartel parties, and the origin and evolution of parties whose structures model commercial enterprises (business firm parties). In addition, influences which are external to the party politics environment in Central and Eastern Europe must be taken into account. These include the reinforcement of political elites as the result of Europeanization and internationalization (see note 3) and the fact that the environment within which party politics operates is undergoing change in the form of new styles of political communication being used, the professionalization and centralization of campaign management, the increased application of political marketing, and public demand for strong leadership. Let us begin with the issue of the stability of party competition and the stability of the alignment between the electorate and parties. Because of the Communist regimes in place, no marked social cleavages in the countries of Central Europe similar to those that were formative for Western European party politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ever developed. The tradition of democratic politics in these countries was already weak before the Communists took power (see Cabada et al. 2014: 11-42). During the post-communist transition to democracy, new cleavages were formed, but they were fairly political in nature not a reflection of social cleavages, but the outcome of long-term exposure to the principal themes of political parties to which segments of the electorate only gradually formed ties (see Hloušek Kopeček 2008: ; Rohrschneider and Whitefield 2009: ). Political cleavages, however, do not create particularly strong alignments between the electorate and parties, and ultimately heighten not only volatility but also the potential for politics to be personalized, thus reinforcing the role of strong leaders. 6 In terms of their internal structure and the extent to which they have become established within the political system, in general, political parties have been institutionalized to a weaker degree in Central Europe than have their counterparts in the West. As Jack Bielasiak (2002) reminds us, the relatively low degree of institutionalisation is related to the transition towards democracy as such and the gradual establishment of political systems and, particularly, electoral systems. As a result, there is high volatility (for empirical data, see Cabada et al. 2014: ) and a greater probability of electoral earthquakes (Czech Republic 2010 and 2013, Poland 2001, Hungary 2010, Slovenia 2011 and 2014). Older parties, more established as collective actors, have had to make way for newer political actors, a process that has usually entailed voters punishing the parties in power and clearing the way for new, very frequently populist protest parties as well as parties with a high degree of personalization (Haughton Deegan Krause 2015: 74-75). 7 Another factor indispensable to the reinforcement of presidentialized party politics lies in the tendency of established Central European parties to organize as cartel parties. In our area of research, one factor in the cartelization of political party functioning is the practically exclusive 6 This is also related to scepticism over the quality of democracy and the associated negative attitude on the part of the public to the parties as collective actors (cf. Kuković 2013: 25-26). 7 In this context, Haughton and Deegan-Krause speak of celebrity leadership.

4 dependence parties have on state funding, at least those that are not entrepreneurial parties (Kopecký 2006: ). Another is the traditionally weak member base of political parties, which has dwindled further over time, and the professionalization and oligarchization of party functioning, now in the hands of a narrow elite. As Ingrid van Biezen (2003: 167) has noted: the overlap between the parliamentary group and the party executive is so considerable that it sometimes becomes difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between the different faces of the party organization. To that we may add that the differentiation of party elites from the executive elite is similarly difficult within Central European Parliamentary democracies. The interconnection of the party elite and public office holders increases their role in the functioning of the party (van Biezen Kopecký 2014: ). In what follows, we assess the extent to which plurality persists within this narrow elite, and whether there are observable elements of presidentialization in internal party politics. There has recently been an increase in the number of entrepreneurial issue parties in Central European countries (Harmel Svåsand 1993). David Arter (2013: 3) such a party as being formed by one person who does not hold a position in government. It must have external origins, represent the work of a single entrepreneur and will be closely associated with an issue prioritized by the founder of the party enterprise. 8 Logically, in a party thus created, the role played by the leader is of enormous importance and its success, particularly if it involves success in the elections or participation in a coalition government, heightens the degree of presidentialization in that particular party. Contemporary political communication trends also support the concentration of political power in the hands of leaders. This is chiefly due to the centralization and professionalization of election campaigns, which in this current era of television and the internet may be conducted in an Americanized style that utilizes hired consultants, focused on mobilizing voters nationwide and personalizing the election contest. 9 This style of campaigning took root quickly in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of communism (Plasser Plasser 2002), reinforcing the communication role of party leaders. In some Central European countries, the ownership structure of national and/or regional media must be taken into account. So called media moguls, who combine ownership of important media outlets with direct or indirect engagement in politics, are characteristic of Bulgaria, Romania, and Latvia (Örnebring 2012: 505), but they are also present in Central Europe. Discounting Pavol Rusko and ANO in Slovakia in (Kopeček 2006), most significant concentration of media and political power is in the hands of Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic and the focused effort to influence state media by Orbán in Hungary. Another significant element is the personalization of campaigns. But as Webb and Poguntke (2013: ) note, this only involves personalization to the extent that the campaign is built around the party leaders. Two Paths to Presidentialization: Operationalization of the Concept to Researching Central European Parties 8 This definition is, in our opinion, more general and therefore more suitable to encompass a complex and many times variable Central European reality than the business-firm-party concept (Hopkin Paolucci 1999). 9 However, as research by Margit Tavits (2013) shows, this trend does not apply absolutely in the sense that media coverage and the professionalization of campaigns would be the only factors that help win elections.

5 The analysis below dissects the statutes and secondary literature to empirically follow presidentialization in five Central European countries, and attempts to demonstrate that presidentialization is a growing contemporary trend, but one with historical roots. Our focus is on the role played by reinforcing party leaders within political parties. A look at parties in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia shows that, in terms of origin and development, there are two types of political party: 1) those which came into being in the early phase of the democratic transformation and whose organizational structure has undergone a rather long period of consolidation, and 2) new parties which have come into being in reaction to political crises involving the established parties, and which may and in fact logically must experiment with their organizational setups. The following table provides an overview of these types of parties after Presidentialization of the organizational structure is a highly attractive option, particularly for the newly originated parties. But a tendency to reinforce the party leader is also found in some parties that might be designated as traditional in Central Europe, and in some cases, such reinforcement took place even before the period on which this analysis focuses. The explanation that follows will therefore focus on two subtypes of presidentialization, the first being presidentialization as an innovation strategy in traditional parties undergoing the process in a gradual manner, and the second, presidentialization as the basis of an organization, something which is seen in parties whose organization is structured in a presidentialized manner from the outset. Presidentialization as an Innovation Strategy: From Collective Leadership to Strong Leaders Strong leaders may be expected for extreme right-wing parties, and Central European extreme-right entities successful in the first decade after the fall of communism were indeed led by strong men (Miroslav Sládek in SPR-RSČ, István Csurka in MIÉP 10, Ján Slota in the Slovak SNS and Zmago Jelinčič in the Slovenian SNS). These parties were formed during the first phase of the democratic transition process, and sometimes emerged from historical predecessors. The influence of their chairmen was felt not only in election campaigns, or in the parties depiction in the media, but also in the chairmen s influence on party operations and the formulation of party ideology. These parties success in elections often rose and fell with that of their leaders JOBBIK, which replaced MIÉP in the position of Hungarian extreme right, also has a strong leader but is not a one-man party (Havlík 2012: ). 11 Selfdefense and LPR, parties which had otherwise had been strongly personalized, had a similar marginal influence on general trends in the formation of power relationships and informal organizational patterns in Polish party competition.

6 The mainstream parties of the Central European moderate right and the moderate left were characterized by a rather more collective manner of leadership in which the party chairman was balanced by other significant political personalities at the helm of the party. Despite the significant role played by the party faces, these mostly highly professionalized, rather pragmatic leaders did not usually follow a strategy of strongly reinforcing their power within their parties and their informal position within the party elite. Attempts made by Jiří Paroubek (ČSSD), Leszek Miller (SLD) and Ferenc Gyurcsányi (MSzP) to centralize, streamline, and Americanize party operations encountered resistance from the member base and national and regional party elites (Tavits 2013: and ). In their effort to convert the rapid professionalization of election campaigns into practical politics, the parties both encountered financial restrictions and grappled with insufficient numbers of party members to do the work. The strong personalization of election campaigns that took place in the Czech Republic and Hungary in 2006 due to massive political marketing was characterized by elections being conceived as contests between the two strongest parties (ČSSD versus ODS and MSzP versus Fidesz), personified by their leaders and by a combination of unachievable promises and negative campaigning (Dieringer 2009: ; Čaloud et al. 2006: 42-88). The sobering-up period after the election was difficult, as testified to by the following statement from Gyurcsány: I almost perished because I had to pretend for 18 months that we were governing. Instead, we lied morning, noon and night (BBC 2006). In these cases, the tendency to presidentialization was evident only on a temporary basis, conditioned by an ambitious leader with whose electoral failure it terminated. But even with mainstream parties to the right of the political centre, we must differentiate the situation of a visible leader who continues to be limited by the power distribution within the broader party elite from that of a real attempt at presidentialize in the party leadership. This tendency to a visible but not omnipotent leader was demonstrated over the long term by parties in the Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic (for example ODS at the time of Václav Klaus and partially of Mirek Topolánek or KDU-ČSL under Josef Lux and Miroslav Kalousek). 12 As we show in what follows, the shift towards a truly presidentialized leadership model took place only in the case of Orbán s Fidesz, the Polish PiS and Slovenian SDS lead by Janez Janša. With PO, led by Donald Tusk, this tendency was weaker, limited by the period of time from when Tusk was selected as party head (2003), and when he left to become President of the European Council (2014). Tusk s formal and informal positions were weaker versus PiS (Sobolewska-Myślik et al. 2010: ) and the presidentialization of PO thus took place rather in the electoral sphere and that of governmental politics. Orbán assumed the position of de facto party leader when Fidesz was founded by a group of friends and student activists as an alternative political movement (Tavits 2013: 178). In spite of this, from the outset Fidesz s leadership functioned like a collective body. The transformation to a 12 In 2009, Miroslav Kalousek left KDU-ČSL and became one of the founders of TOP09. But even his position within the party organization may be designated as presidentialized within the meaning of the defining characteristics of this term indicated above for two reasons. Firstly, Kalousek is not the chairman of the party; the chairman is the charismatic Karel Schwarzenberg, who the party s electoral embodiment and who, at least symbolically, limits Kalousek s power in the party. Secondly, the party closely works together with the Starostové a Nezávislí movement, which has restricted Kalousek s power in the governmental and parliamentary spheres.

7 significantly centralized, personalized power distribution occurred only when Fidesz was converted from a youth movement into a political party in the mid-1990s. Orbán s personal leadership gained in significance during that era (Enyedy Linek 2008: 468), even in areas to do with the selection of candidates for parliamentary elections. The fact that Orbán has had no rival for the position of party chairman since 1994 is one sign that leadership is more centralized in Fidesz than in other traditional Hungarian parties (Dieringer 2009: 88; Enyedy 2006: 1111). Orbán s strong position as party head was naturally reflected in the election campaigns of 2010 (Batory 2010: 4-5) and 2014 (Mudde 2014). However the stunning result for the party in the 2014 elections in terms of seats obtained in the parliament must be seen as the product of an artificially created majority, one that arose from a new electoral system that ensured Orbán would gain two-thirds of those seats for a mere 44.5% of votes cast. In Slovenia, SDS underwent a somewhat different transformation process between 1993 and Janez Janša, a charismatic politician, was elected head of the party, and transformed it from a social-democratic orientation towards one of conservatism with strong populist features. He reinforced his informal power within the party structure and gradually presidentialized the party s management style (Cabada 2000: 80). For Slovenia, the tendency to manage parties via a small circle of elites and a liking for the cartel party model is characteristic (Krašovec Haughton 2011: 202), but only with SDS may we speak of a trend towards an informally presidentialized party structure established over a long period. Janša s personality has also figured significantly in the party s election campaigns, particularly in 2011, when he showed himself to be a figure with a highly personalized style of party management that polarized the Slovenian public, with the result that issues related to his own political and economic actions overshadowed the party s platform message (Haughton Krašovec 2013: 202). In Slovakia, there has been a strong tendency towards personalization, particularly involving the presidentialization of HZDS, led by the charismatic Vladimir Mečiar. Mečiar built a successful party with a mass membership base that function with a combination of charismatic leadership and patron-client practices. The party was formally organized as a movement based upon Public Against Violence, a Slovak umbrella movement, but the power was effectively concentrated in the hands of its chairman. Despite the numerous challengers who regularly ran against him in 1993, 1994, , 2002, 2003, and 2008 citing his autocratic decision-making, Mečiar held onto the post of party chairman, and these repeated victories in party elections confirmed and reinforced his position (Rybář 2011: 57). Formal confirmation of the leader s dominance came with a change in the law in 2000 (Kopeček 2006: ). By the late 1990s, other political party projects in Slovakia were signalling a trend which was to spread into Central Europe, in which parties were started from scratch by strong political figures with a presidentialized concentration of power within the party ordained genetically. Among these was SOP, founded by Rudolf Schuster, mayor of Košice, and ANO, founded by Pavol Rusko, the first entrepreneurial issue party in Central Europe. 13 Both of these parties, however, managed stay in the parliament only for a single election period (Kopeček 2006: 261 and ). In a spirit similar to that of the ANO and SOP projects, Smer came into being in It was founded by Robert Fico, a former SDL politician who reacted to the fall of his party by founding a new 13 Rusko was co-owner and CEO of Markýza, a successful Slovak private TV channel.

8 left-wing entity. The combination of protest rhetoric directed against Mečiar s HZDS and against the right-wing government of the time, along with the party s antiestablishment appeal and strong leadership both outside and inside the party resulted in its swift establishment in the Slovak party spectrum. Later, for pragmatic reasons, Fico with some complications retargeted the party towards social democracy, while maintaining its remarkable organizational form concentrated in the hands of the party chairman. Initially, only the chairman, the general manager, and the party bureau created the structure of the highest party bodies. There were no vice chairman to endanger Fico s power. From 1999 until 2001, the entire organizational structure of the party was built upon the managerial principle. Only after 2001 did a more or less classic organizational structure arise in an attempt to look more like a standard social-democratic party, one that was centralized, even at the level of regional structures. But it is important that the actual reorganization did not endanger Fico s dominance, nor did it impact his intensively hierarchical style of party management (Rybář 2011: 51). The gap between the organizational structure and the actual dominance of the party chairman actually increased somewhat. Smer s operation was not de-presidentialized even once its membership base had been increased in a 2004 merger with small left-wing parties Kopeček 2006: , Rybář 2011: 65-69). During the first decade of the new millennium, Fico s personality became a dominant element, polarizing Slovak public opinion, and reflected in the strong personalization of electoral campaigns that took place (Haughton et al. 2011: ). Nor did Fico hesitate to leverage his position as Prime Minister in the 2010 election campaign. Fico s campaign highlighted the role he played in managing the consequences of the floods suffered in eastern Slovakia at that time, as well as extraordinary sessions of parliament he called (Henderson 2010: 6). Fico played up this heritage of a strong, proactive government in the 2012 elections, as well, contrasted to the fragmented cabinet of Iveta Radičová (Spáč 2014: 344). This personalization of election campaigns has generally been present in all five countries of Central Europe, very frequently taking the form of Americanization, with a strong media component and the professionalization of campaigns and greater emphasis on the debate over which strong leader of the large political parties will assume the Prime Minister s post after the election. But this presidentialization in election campaigns does not always transfer to internal party operations or into the presidentialization of governmental politics. Poland s PiS has also possessed strong tendencies towards presidentialization from the beginning of its existence. Under the leadership of Lech ( ) and Jaroslaw Kaczyński (since 2003), the party has focused primarily on forming its ideological attitudes as opposed to creating a party organization that would dilute the power of the party elite headed by its chairman (Tavits 2013: 237). Initially, PiS built upon the strong popularity of Kaczyński and a vaguely described project targeting transformation of the Polish political system (the Fourth Polish Republic ), personified in the long-term political work of both brothers (Hloušek Kopeček 2010: 175). The 2005 presidential election campaign represented a significant example of the increased level of presidentialization in Polish elections. In the second round, the battle was between two strong party leaders Tusk and Kaczyński. Each man was responsible for the strategy of his party, and in each case that same strategy was used in both the presidential elections and in the parliamentary elections that had taken place two weeks earlier (Millard 2010: ). This trend toward the presidentialization of PiS was reinforced from , when Lech Kaczyński served as

9 president. 14 This was apparent in the intense media debate that surrounded the leaders of the strongest parties in the 2007 Polish parliamentary elections. In addition to Tusk and the Kaczyński brothers there was Aleksander Kwaśniewski, a left-wing candidate who had been president from (Millard 2010: ). According to Polish political experts, a television debate in which Tusk clearly outdid Kaczyński was one of the key moments in PO s victory. 15 Both the 2010 presidential elections and the 2011 parliamentary elections, which took place following the tragic death of Lech Kaczyński, were used by his brother Jaroslaw to reinforce the party leadership s charisma, this time bolstered by the cult of the deceased president. This was not only an election strategy, but was also used by Kaczyński to further a highly authoritarian style of party management (Tworzecki 2013: ). A comparison of the position of chairman in current mainstream presidentialized parties based upon their party statutes (Fidesz 2013; PiS 2013; Smer 2013) shows that presidentialization is a rather informal process of reinforcing the leader s power. Formally, the definition of the function and powers of the chairmen of Smer and SDS reveals no extraordinary powers; the chairman is part of the collective party leadership. In PiS, most of his actions must be okayed by other collective leadership bodies. But the chairman also plays a role in the formal nomination process, for example, in preparing the ballots for presidential and parliamentary elections, as well as elections to the European Parliament. With a strong political personality at the helm of the party, this does not effectively prevent the party leader s influence from being strengthened. In the case of Fidesz, powers that formally reinforce the chairman s power include the option to appoint the party s regional directors and to bind party members right down to the level of the local party organization to rules that benefit the successful implementation of election campaigns. Fidesz, then, is, among traditional parties, the organization that has seen the greatest formalization of the presidentialization process. Presidentialization as the Basis of an Organization: The Preferred Organizational model in Contemporary Central European Politics As noted above, a number of newly-created parties show a tendency towards the presidentialization of leadership. These are parties that are frequently formed by strong political figures as personal projects. Current examples include the Czech parties VV, ANO, and Úsvit Přímé Demokracie, the Polish TR, the Slovak SaS and Slovenian projects DL, PS, SMC and ZaAB. VV, a party that took part in Czech parliamentary and governmental politics from , is a peculiar case among entrepreneurial issue parties. Starting in 2005, when it was still a small, nonparliamentary party active in Prague city politics, it began to be taken over by a group led by Vít 14 Furthermore, in his brother Jaroslaw was the Prime minister who transferred the strongly personalized style of leadership from PiS to the government (Nalewajko 2013: ). With slight exaggeration, we might speak of PiS during the period as a superpresidentialized party. 15 However, the attempt to make similar use of the TV debate between the two strongest leaders prior to the 2011 elections for the benefit of Tusk, with a stronger media presence, ended up with PiS refusing to take part in such a debate (Szczerbiak 2012: 6).

10 Bárta, the owner of a security agency. He became the party s formal chairman only during a severalmonth period after its de facto disappearance in 2013, but it was Bárta who was completely responsible for the party s direction, and he made both the strategic and the organization decisions. The combination of populism, political marketing, and massive centralization of the party decisionmaking process made VV a presidentialized party on a level unprecedented in the Czech Republic, one which in many respects was more reminiscent of a private firm with a management hierarchy than of a democratic political party (see Havlík Hloušek 2014: ). Tomio Okamura s Úsvit Přímé Demokracie was a highly presidentialized entrepreneurial issue party from its beginnings. Its formal foundation came as a political movement in June Okamura was an entrepreneur and senator in the Czech parliament whose goal was to get a slate elected to Parliament in the early elections of autumn From the outset, Okamura formed the movement as a highly hierarchical, small, professional structure. Its members never exceeded nine in number, less than the fourteen MPs elected to the Chamber of Deputies on its behalf. Under its statutes, (Úsvit 2014), the chairman has the right to veto the acceptance of any new member, giving the movement an organizational structure more similar to that of a joint stock company than a political party. The actual level of centralisation of the movement s operation both internally and externally and the lack of transparent accounting led to growing dissatisfaction by some MPs elected on behalf of Úsvit. In January 2012, they ousted the head of the Parliamentary Club, who was loyal to Okamura, and shortly thereafter announced they were attempting to build a new party inspired by the French Front National. Úsvit s fate was sealed. During his short time in the parliament, Okamura represented a model of extreme presidentialization. SaS was established in the early months of 2009 by Richard Sulík, an entrepreneur and economist who had prepared the reform of the Slovak tax system in In terms of its ideology, the party is characterized as a right wing party focused primarily on economic liberalism, combined with soft euroscepticism. Especially in its beginnings, the party protested the actions of existing parties, emphasizing that it was not building upon any prior political grouping. The party s possession of a dominant leader, a spiritual father, at the helm since its founding, has meant that the party has explicitly given up attracting a mass membership. It is not a closed club like it s Czech counterpart Úsvit, but the procedure for the enrolment of new members is complex, and the party has never made any effort to increase the size of its member base (Mesežnikov 2013: 63). The informal dominance of Sulík, the chairman, is indicated by the party statutes (SaS undated) fairly ambiguously. He is present by virtue of the fact that the powers of each national body are given in detail, exhaustively, but anything not explicitly laid out may be decided by the chairman. 16 TR served from the beginning as a tool to further the political career of its founder, Janusz Palikot. Palikot had been very successful as a Polish businessman for some time, and entered politics only in 2005, becoming one of the most stringent critics of PiS and the Kaczyński brothers. Palikot s 16 The OĽaNO movement represents a fascinating, specific example. It originated as an independent party in 2011, but its representatives had run just one year before on the SaS ticket. Among other Central European formations with anti-racist rhetoric, OĽaNO is remarkable because it gave up on creating any organizational structure, explained by an effort to be a platform that welcomes any independent figure from among the citizenry. The cornerstone is its chairman, Igor Maťovič (Spáč 2012: 241). But because of its declared anti-party nature and especially because of the free-hand principle, which allows politicians in the movement to vote entirely according to their conscience, we cannot speak of presidentialization in the case of OĽaNO.

11 gradual radicalization and his iconoclastic, deliberately provocative style of political communication resulted in him leaving the PO to found his own movement in late 2010 and early This new party, called the Palikot Movement, came into being in summer of 2011 and, thanks to a successful campaign built around the leader (Gałązka Waszak 2013: 210) that rebranded him as a serious politician instead of a rebel (Szczerbiak 2012: 9), it defied pre-election surveys to win seats in parliament. In autumn of 2013, the party merged with several small groups to become the formation now called TR. Palikot s domination was in no way lessened. TR s statutes (TR 2013) show, in conjunction with research done by Polish scholars (Gałązka Waszak 2013: ), that the degree of presidentialization in the party s organizational structure is somewhat lower than that present in the Czech entrepreneurial issue parties. Internal disagreements have taken place within the movement, and the mechanisms for creating the candidate slate tend toward participation of collective bodies. But TR does not encourage a mass membership base and Palikot remains the sole political figure to represent the party to the world at large. In Slovenia, the 2011 and 2014 parliamentary elections brought an influx of new presidential political formations. DL, led by Gregor Virant, a university professor, won seats in the parliament (Virant had been the most popular minister under Janša s government, heading the Ministry of Public Administration). His starting the party particularly surprised SDS, because Virant, even though not an official member of Janša s party, had taken part in preparing SDS s platform (Krašovec Haughton 2012: 7-8). But this strongly personalized party dropped sharply in the 2014 elections, even though Alenka Bratušek was in the government. * The parties noted above fulfil or have fulfilled the characteristics of a presidentialized party in the party politics sphere and those of an organization in the sphere of electoral politics. Because of their fairly restricted voter support, and because their ideological profiles (Úsvit) or strategic choices (Palikot, VV and SaS) have placed them outside the political mainstream, they have not ordinarily aspired to the status of presidentialized parties at the level of governmental politics, even if their participation in the government has in some cases witnessed a specific type of presidentialized style (VV). But some of these new parties (ANO, PS, SMC), thanks to support from the voters and because they have assumed (co-) responsibility for the government, have or could have practiced the presidentialized political style in this sphere. ANO was founded as a political movement 17 in 2011 by Andrej Babiš, owner of Agrofert, a leading Czech and Central European economic group particularly active in the food and petrochemical industries. The movement originated in autumn of 2011, a product of Babiš s populist criticism in the media of the Czech political, and especially the governmental, elite as feckless and corrupt. The movement was formally registered in May 2012, and in October 2013, it came in second in the early parliamentary elections, entering the governing coalition. From the outset, top management at Agrofert took part in organizing the movement. 18 Behind the façade of well-known 17 The term party is perceived by the Czech public as somewhat discredited; for this reason a number of new entities prefer the form of a political movement. The difference is purely semantic; under the law (Act No. 424/1991 Coll., as amended) movements and parties are subject to identical requirements. 18 In this respect, the process of forming ANO is strongly reminiscent of the founding of Forza Italia in the early 1990s.

12 faces, frequently recruited from outside traditional party politics to lure voters, stood a substantially hierarchical, centralized structure more reminiscent of a company than a party. The infrequent attempts made by the movement or at conventions of regional organizations for political emancipation have always come up against the strong resistance of Babiš, who exercises his leadership in a highly personalized fashion (Kopeček 2015). The clearest expression of the movement s centralization and pacification of its member base came at the convention of spring 2015, where there was no discussion whatsoever, in spite of statutes being modified and the party leadership being elected. The symbolic apex was the unanimous reelection of Babiš as party head without rival. 19 Babiš took a similarly radical tack during the early parliamentary elections in 2013, when he used the slogan, We re not politicians, we work! to present himself as a successful entrepreneur and the only person capable of changing Czech politics. Babiš dominated the election campaign ANO invested heavily in campaign advertising and media coverage of the elections. In addition to buying MAFRA, which publishes the most-read Czech non-tabloid print outlet, in summer 2013, he also became a central figure in media coverage when allegations arose that before 1989, he had collaborated with the Communist Secret Police (Havlík et al. 2014: 75-83). But even these cosmetic changes ultimately end up formalizing the presidentialization of the party s internal activity. Under the amended statutes, the chairman has effectively become essential during political negotiations, while the Bureau has gotten the right to appoint candidates for all types of elections. Article 13 is also important in that it defines the positions of the chairman and vice chairman of the movement, and grants the chairman the right to appoint or revoke the movement s key manager, as well as regional managers. The role of managers, meantime, is not defined under the Statutes in any way; instead it is governed by ANO s internal regulations. Because of the twotrack political and managerial management structure, the chairman thus gets hold of a very significant lever in determining key issues related to the financial and administrative functioning of the party. In Slovenia, PS also founded shortly before the parliamentary elections, specifically in October 2011 by Zoran Janković, a Slovenian entrepreneur and mayor of Ljubljana from (reelected in 2012). Because of the growing importance of the media in campaigns, and particularly because of the television debates focused on the search for the new prime minister, Janković was able to transform the campaign into a personal battle between the chairmen of PS and SDS (Janez Janša) for the post (Krašovec Haughton 2012: 8). The party won the greatest number of seats in the parliament, but was still locked out of the governing coalition. The original promise brought by the presidentialized style of leadership in PS was inverted in January 2013, when Janković resigned after allegations were made against him by the Commission for the Prevention of Corruption of the Republic of Slovenia. His position at the helm of the party was taken by Alenka Bratušek, who put together a coalition government in the interim period. But Janković soon sought to return to the head of the party, and his success in getting reelected chairman in April 2014 not only drove Bratušek and her supporters out of the party and forced the fall of the PS coalition government, it also reinstalled a charismatic leader with presidential tendencies in party organization and management 19 Babiš obtained 186 votes, of which one was invalid. The composition of the Bureau fully corresponds to the ideas Babiš set out at the congress. The fact that, when the congress was unable to elect the fourteenth and final member of the Bureau, it decided there would be only 13 members, is further testimony to the style of his organization (Kopecký Wirnitzer 2015).

13 at the helm of the party. Further development of this tendency was blocked by the party s freefall in both the European and parliamentary elections in But the faction led by Bratušek continued to build a party structure around a strong political figure. ZaAB became a political party in May A comparative analysis of organizational documents from both parties is enlightening (PS 2013; ZaAB undated). They resemble each other to a great extent in those sections devoted to the party chairman, including the fact that the party chairman is to be elected by a general vote of all members. As regards the formal definition of the party leader, the statutes in both parties bring no extraordinary competencies, and thus in this case, as well, we must instead explore the informal presidentialization of the party s functioning. The last party to be analysed, Slovenia s SMC, also in some sense followed in the footsteps of DL in Miro Cerar got into politics shortly before the 2014 parliamentary elections, prior to which he had been a professor of constitutional law at the University of Ljubljana and an advisor to the Slovenian parliament. A mere six weeks before the elections, he founded the eponymous Miro Cerar Party. Playing off his image as an expert (he was one of the drafters of the Slovenian constitution), non-politician and corruption fighter, he won the elections, obtaining more than a third of the vote. In 2014, he became Prime Minister of Slovenia. In March 2015, the party congress changed its name to the Modern Centre Party, while retaining the designation SMC. The statutes currently in effect (SMC 2015) were also adopted, and do not formally exceed the limits designated for Slovenian party leaders. Because of the way the party came into being and the rapidity with which its leader became Prime Minister of a government in which the party holds the majority of positions (ten out of seventeen), one cannot rule out the hypothesis that a new, significantly presidentialized party has come into being. Potential and Limits of the Party Presidentialization Concept as Applied to Central Europe The presidentialization of the organization and distribution of power within parties is in a growth trend in Europe; the parties are also capable of achieving promising electoral gains, as is schematically shown in the following figure. The figure shows all Central European countries have been impacted by the incidence and success at the polls of presidentialized parties, but certain differences may be observed in the general trend. Parties in the Czech Republic are most resistant to presidentialization. In Hungary, the trend is declining, but only modestly. In Poland and Slovenia, there is a growing proportion of parties that are presidentialized the functioning of their party organizations. With the exception of Slovakia, the proportion of new parties opting for a presidentialized party face from the outset is growing. In Poland and in Hungary, however, traditional parties that have only recently undergone significant presidentialization still prevail. In these cases, presidentialization is the result of strategic innovation aimed at mobilizing voters. It is certainly true that the presidentialization concept should be an

14 integral part of the research arsenal of any scholar focused on party politics and the functioning of political parties in the Central European region. In attempting to summarize the overview of presidentialized parties given above, the presence of both formulas for the presidentialization of party organization is clear: 1) presidentialization as an innovation strategy, in which established parties that have traditionally opted for collective party leadership transfer power to a strong leader to aid their expansion and survival in a volatile election market, and 2) presidentialization as the basis of an organization, with a clear preference for a strongly centralized, personalized party that is built around a leader from the outset. This latter is an attractive choice for parties currently being created in the context of the changes that have shook Central European party systems in electoral earthquakes that have brought new opportunities for antiestablishment and protest parties. But as we have seen, this formula was present long before the post-2010 period that is our central focus. Observing the fate of stronger presidentialized parties allows us to see how the benefit of having a strong leader, one who need not bother with internal party democracy and debate among various wings in a broader party elite, may turn sour when the charismatic leader falls out of voters favour or the party expends its protest capital by taking part in the governing coalition. Despite this, it is justifiable to presume that the trend towards presidentialization in party leadership will not easily be turned around in Europe, nor will the trend towards strongly centralized, highly personalized internal party politics with a dominant leader. The lack of interest shown by citizens in political participation via party membership has logically forced the elites to search for other organizational models than those offered by mass or catch-all parties. The centralization of decision-making may bring with it certain comparative advantages in the electoral and party politics sphere. Within Central Europe, though, total presidentialization in the governmental sphere comes up against a number of limits. Looming large among them is the long-term tradition of coalition governments, which logically restricts opportunities for strong party leaders to unconditionally dominate government policy and prevents them from shifting their roles toward that of the president in a presidential system. In particular, in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Slovenia, coalition governments are brought in terms of the parties represented, and seats are frequently distributed in a way that intentionally blocks the dominance of the strongest member of the governing coalition. In all the central European countries except Hungary, minority governments are frequent, substantially limiting the role of the prime minister in the parliamentary sphere and, in a sense, pushing the need for compromise from the governmental sphere to the parliamentary. But even prime ministers in the journey, ideologically heterogeneous coalitions must also sometimes seek partners (Jiří Paroubek , Janez Drnovšek ). To that may be added the fact that minority coalition governments are no rarity (Balík et al. 2011: ; Cabada et al. 2014: ). If we exclude the era of Vladimir Mečiar in Slovakia ( and ), it is the governmental sphere in Hungary that stands alone in this regard. Hungary, too, has seen many years of coalition governments, but these normally comprise two parties, with the stronger coalition member possessing a significant power edge. This is true for both most socialist governments (Gyula Horn , Ferenc Gyurcsányi ) and for Orbán s cabinets post In Poland, such dominance has occurred only in the governments led by PO under Donald Tusk ( ). Presidentialized leadership was a factor in the government of Robert Fico when he helmed a single-