EU: Disappointing political progress in neighbouring states will temper celebrations in Romania and Bulgaria, writes Daniel McLaughlin in Budapest
Romania and Bulgaria will celebrate winning a place in the European Union today, but a glance at their neighbours may temper their enthusiasm.
Hungarians are protesting, Poles are watching their ruling coalition collapse, Czechs are still waiting for a new government three months after elections, and many Slovaks are appalled that their prime minister has joined forces with far-right nationalists.
All four countries joined the EU in May 2004, along with Slovenia, the three Baltic states and Malta and Cyprus.
They are the main powers on the EU's new eastern flank, and have sought to increase their influence in the 25-nation bloc through their own four-member club, the Visegrad Group.
But elections this year in all four countries exposed the fault lines that run through the entire former Soviet bloc, where many people resent centre-left parties for their roots in communism, and centre-right parties often flirt with the nationalist fringe.
Across the region, millions of people feel poorer now than they did in a communist society that guaranteed them a job, a place to live, cheap utilities and free education and healthcare.
They also loathe the countless former communists who now occupy powerful and lucrative positions in politics, business, media and the security services, and believe the ubiquitous conspiracy theory that, whoever is nominally in power, ex-communists really still control their country through shadowy networks that were not dismantled after 1989.
In Poland, the Kaczynski twins came to power last year promising a "moral revolution" to sweep former communists from public life. Their determination to cement control spawned an alliance with nationalist parties from right and left, and their unwieldy populist coalition has now collapsed.
In Slovakia, millions of people felt no benefit from its transformation into a magnet for foreign investors, and replaced a government of economic liberals with the populist Robert Fico, who promptly allied with a far-right leader to secure power.
The neighbouring Czech Republic is in limbo after June elections split parliament exactly down the middle between left- and right-wing blocs, and it now limps along under an interim government that is unable to pass any meaningful legislation.
Now Hungary has been rocked by its worst unrest since the 1956 uprising against communist rule, an event that many protesters have evoked as they try to oust prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany, a former communist who became a millionaire tycoon.
The crisis was sparked by a leaked recording of a speech to Socialist Party allies in which Mr Gyurcsany admitted lying "day and night" about the dire state of the economy and the drastic cutbacks needed to fix it, to ensure he won re-election in April. He now refuses to resign and vows to push through unpopular reforms that successive Hungarian governments have avoided, creating instead the biggest budget deficit in the EU by spending lavishly to woo voters.
Hungarians, Mr Gyurcsany says, must now bite the economic bullet. Poles have already bitten it, and millions have headed west to escape unemployment of over 15 per cent. The stand-in Czech government is worried about its own budget deficit, and analysts fear the Slovak leader's "economic nationalism" will scare away investors.
As they raise their champagne glasses today, leaders in Bucharest and Sofia surely see that east Europeans are enduring their own kind of EU "enlargement fatigue" and that, unless they feel the promised benefits of membership, their people will seek redress at the ballot box or, as in Budapest, on the streets.