Countering national-level populism with local politics? The cases of Budapest and Warsaw

Populism as a political phenomenon gained excessive scholarly attention in the past decade as populists around the world have gained relevance. While there is a vast knowledge about the drivers and institutional, procedural impacts of populism in power, the way political opposition reacts to the populist challenge is seriously understudied. This paper aims to fill this gap by looking at the cases of Budapest and Warsaw as two municipalities that are led by opposition politicians who have to deal with the populist national governments of Hungary and Poland respectively. Theoretically, the paper problematizes the national-local nexus within populism research, and concentrates on response strategies against populism. With this, it not only adds to existing research which only considered local manifestations of populism rather than local opposition to populism (and how the latter reacts to the former), but it also carries an added-value in terms of answering to the populist mode of governance. Here, the context of the Covid-19 pandemic also becomes relevant as the Hungarian and Polish governments often used the crisis situation to initiate populist policies negatively affecting opposition municipalities in particular. Consequently, the practical, empirical side is fleshed out through the examples of two members of the ‘Free Cities Alliance’, Budapest and Warsaw, and their mayors. The paper provides a summary of the populist discourse and policies with which the administration of these two capitals had to cope with in the past few years, and information on responsive strategies of the two mayors and their team which were gathered through semi-structured interviews. Besides the focus on local-national relations, and the responsive strategies, the study also adds to the body of literature concentrating on the East-Central European region, and the links between populism and the Covid-19 pandemic.