Post-1991 developments, in particular the results of the elections in postcommunist countries, did not confirm “the death of the Communism”, but just a light “transition to democracy”. Someone would have hardly anticipated the comeback to power of born-again “socialist” leaders and their reformed communist parties (which now, switched their names in socialist parties or democratic left), in many East-European countries following the events of 1989. Nonetheless, some of these parties proved themselves successfully to the public in order to remain into power. They succeeded in a democratic administration and governance of some post-communist countries, they had been able to inspirit the emergence of a functional democratic system with a proper stateapparatus, shaping the democratic form of these countries and stimulating their further successful development.

The main argument which stays for the continuous survival of the ex-communist parties in the post-communist period is that they are characterized by a long political tradition and an organizational history, and also by an internal structure which constituted an advantage in comparison with the other post-1989 emergent parties. In others words, they already have a freestanding existence, a political experience and the required resources for playing the role of a political party on the new political scene of a postcommunist country. They didn’t have to start from the beginning like many of other new founded partisan groups or to rebuild their identity like many other classic political parties, which were suspended in the communist period and their existence was interrupted. The only thing the reformed communist parties had to do is to manage with the new and totally different political context, to which they had to adapt. The successful transformation of the communist parties depends on their willingness to play by the rules of the democratic “game”, which becomes the central condition in successful democratization.

This paper focuses on the evaluation of the explanation which can account for the evolution (successfully or not) of the old nomenklatura. Whether the reformed communist parties were able to realize a successfully democratization and to come into prominence on the new political stage, it’s a matter of interpretation. The accommodation and readjustment of an ex-communist party to the new democratic frame depends on inter-party stability and its identical adaptation. The explanation for the different evolution of the old communist nomenklatura in the post-communist (in some of them in

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a triumphant direction, in others not), will consist in the analysis of two differing evolutions of the ex-communist parties, in two countries, namely Poland and the Czech Republic. In the first country, the old communist nomenklatura adapted successfully, fulfilling the new democratic requirements, while in the last one, the reformed communist parties didn’t manage a prosper accommodation, experiencing major difficulties in conforming to the new political constraints. The explanation for the various progresses of the “reformed” communist parties is the existence of conflict within the party (and the quotas that it reached) and party willingness to solve it and to distance themselves from the past. This approach concentrates on the inner structure of political parties and states that the attributes of the competition inside the party is mostly produced of contextually history and the party’s inherent history. Accounting Huntington’s categorization, the tension inside the party might engage the conflict between three types of partisans: “stand-patters”, “liberal reformers” and “democratic reformers”. For Huntington, the path to a successfully democratic transition is, to a great extent, dependent on the competence of the liberal and democratic reformers in a government coalition to overrule the antidemocratic standpatters inside the communist party.

The communist parties have to be electoral challenging in order to survive. The interior development of the ex-communist parties and the divergences within the party, also involves the decision (and not only, but also the empirical action) of the party to cease with the past and to make compromises on the party ideology, in order to remain politically competitive. While the stand-patters see the communist past of their party rather effective than unproductive, the liberals are in favor of democratic competition and the democratic reformers stand for a “social democratic” viewpoint. Undoubtedly, all of these three different ideological directions within the same party, give birth to dissent and contradictions which influence the evolution of the party. In the cases in which all three groups managed to achieve a compromise and to embrace the democratic path, the old communist party succeeded in the democratic transition required by the post-communist period. They fully have to encompass internal party pluralism and to attempt to widen the political and social establishment of the party, which will lead to the party’s electoral success. The relationship between the heterogeneous groups inside the reformed communist party has to become a balancing force within the party.

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