Enyedi, Zsolt2023-06-162023-06-1620202159-9165, 2159-917310.1080/21599165.2020.1787162http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/13869The decline of the quality of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe was facilitated by intellectual, ideological, and organizational innovations of a new authoritarian elite. I this article I discuss five such innovations: a particular combination of victim mentality, self-confidence and resentment against the West, the transformation of neighbor-hating nationalisms into a civilizationist anti-immigrant platform, the delegitimization of civil society and the return to the belief in a strong state, the resurrection of the Christian political identity, and the transformation of populist discourse into a language and organizational strategy that is compatible with governmental roles (“populist establishment”). These factors together point to an overarching ideological fame that I call paternalist populism.engCC BY 4.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Journal articlehttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21599165.2020.1787162