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The success of Jobbik, an extreme-right party in Hungary, is unique in its success compared with other extreme right parties in the Visegrad 4 countries of Central Europe. In contrast to parties in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland, Jobbik has managed to make substantial electoral gains and is a major player in the National Assembly in Hungary. This paper discusses five factors that show how the rise of Jobbik was possible. They are: a tradition of extreme right political movements, a party cleavage structure shaped by morals rather than socioeconomics, a specific national electoral geography, the negotiation style of the party and finally its reaction on the crisis of traditional democratic parties. In contrast to the other V4 nations, only Hungary has these elements present. This text explores each of these factors in a comparative context to demonstrate how Jobbik was able to take advantage of Hungarian political conditions in a way that extreme right parties in other Central European nations cannot.

This chapter explores illiberal trends in the party systems of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Focusing on ANO, SMER, Fidesz and PiS, it first provides a comparative analysis of the ideology these parties use to appeal to the voters. Secondly, it traces the parties in power and analyses how they are translating the illiberal political concepts into laws and policy-making practices. The overarching aim is to understand the relevance that rule of law and legal issues have for the self-positioning vis-à-vis the national public and EU. Based on comparison and the empirical findings, it provides a typology of Central European illiberalism based on the difference between pragmatic and ideological illiberalism.

Over the past two decades, the concept of multi-level governance (MLG) has been increasingly discussed by scholars in the fi eld of European integration. While Gary Marks wrote about a four-level arrangement (supranational, national, regional, and local), over time the regional and local levels often became lumped together as 'substate actors' and so easily conceptually interchangeable. This text, however, shows the fallaciousness of this reasoning. In certain circumstances we can fi nd a competitive relationship between cities and regions, positioning themselves against each other for resources and access to national and supranational fora, especially in the context of the new regionalism. The cities have been given substantial support from the European Commission in recent years and we argue that this new constellation may have a remarkable infl uence on relations and possibly also lead to confl icts among local and regional actors in EU multi-level governance. This was possible to be clearly seen in the Czech Republic (CR) between 2012 and 2014, when heated negotiations took place regarding the implementation of the Integrated Territorial Investment (ITI), a fi nancial instrument of EU Cohesion Policy which was implemented on the substate level -i.e., in cities and regions. In the CR this competition took place in a specifi c context, which also infl uenced its outcome.

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