ABSTRACT
The evolution of the extreme right in post-communist Romania bears some resemblance to its Western counterpart in terms of success after 2000, but also some differences concerning its appearance, discourse and explanations for its popularity. While the success of the extreme right in Western Europe is attributed to the protest vote, due to a reshaping of the party competition space after post-industrialism and the growth of the welfare state (Kitschelt 1995; Veugelers and Magnan 2005), to psychological factors like alienation from politics (Ignazi 1996), or to structural conditions like the high costs of modernization and the lack of rewards for unskilled workers (Betz 1994), in Eastern Europe, the counterparts of modernization losers (Minkenberg 2000) could be called the losers of the transition, and ethnic problems and nationalism are identified as the driving forces for high electoral results for the extreme right (Mudde 2005).
