Since the 2008 financial crisis, Europe’s Eastern and Southern peripheries have experienced a rise of populism.Countries with populist governments, such as Hungary, Poland and Italy, are dominated by right-wing and centrist parties. Leftwing populism in Greece, which once led coalition governments, was replaced by the center-right new democratic party in 2019. This paper focuses on the question of how populism reshapes the economy and integrates into regional and global systems, and analyzes the policy adjustments and limitations of populism in the periphery of Europe by combining the growth model and the theory of dependent development. It argues that populism is a response to the social and economic crisis caused by dependent development, and the European peripheries have adjusted their growth models on the basis of different forms of populism, which is constrained by the dependency relationship between the core and the periphery, and unable to get on the real development track. Hungary and Poland have transformed their foreign-led growth model on the basis of the center-right social coalition, based on nationalism and taxation of foreign companies in non-productive sectors. Greece has implemented internal devaluation and austerity policies to curb domestic demand, and has not realized an export-oriented economic transformation. Italy’s export-led recovery strategy, based on wage compression, has failed to boost exports significantly and instead suppressed domestic demand. Overall, FDI in Central and Eastern Europe has led to a dichotomy between the international and domestic economies. With Southern Europe’s escalating public debt, it has failed to achieve export-led growth. Europe’s periphery is structurally constrained by external capital flows, and it is difficult to get out of dependent development. In the long run, populism will inevitably intensify as the hierarchical relationship between Europe’s core and the periphery being more rigid and the democratic space shrinks.

　　Editor: Zhong Yao  Deng Panyi

　　From: Journal of International Relations.2025.No.2.