WHY does it keep happening? Consider some events of the past week. Andrej Babis, a tycoon with a populist bent, sweeps aside the old guard in a Czech election. Fresh from his own electoral success, Sebastian Kurz, the boy wonder of Austrian conservatism, opens coalition talks with a far-right party that harbours former neo-Nazis in its ranks. Dozens of deputies from the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party take their seats in a Bundestag that was supposed never to find space for their kind, while Viktor Orban, the father of Hungary’s illiberal democracy, declares central Europe a “migrant-free zone”.

It is tempting to seek a single explanation for these disparate phenomena. Perhaps Angela Merkel’s open-door refugee policy of 2015 is to blame. Maybe this is the rage of those left behind by the uneven distribution of globalisation’s booty. Or it could be that the central Europeans have had enough of the overbearing bully-boys of Brussels. Worse, if these outcomes stem from a common cause, some fear they might coalesce into a common threat. Surveying the bleak landscape, one commentator discerns “an insurrection by the Habsburg Empire against the EU.”

That is a misunderstanding. True, the likes of Mr Orban or Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the de facto leader of Poland, pose a genuine threat to the EU by undermining its legal order. But most of the neighbourhood’s leaders seek to harness the benefits of the club they belong to. Mr Kurz’s obsession with managing migration leads him to advocate collective European border controls rather than bash Eurocrats. Mr Babis is a pragmatist who knows his country’s success rests on Europe’s integrated supply chains and open internal borders. Indeed, Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia, is currently enjoying a star turn as the region’s Europhile-in-chief. All have been happy to use the EU as a punchbag when expedient. None wants to blow it up.

Rather than an inveterate nationalist or Eurosceptic, Mr Babis is in fact a man of “no ideology whatsoever,” in the words of a Czech official. Yet this makes his political success, posing as an anti-elitist outsider, even harder to grasp. The Czech economy is one of Europe’s zippiest. Czechs suffer few of the historical grievances or cultural cleavages that beset their neighbours. And yet almost one-third of them plumped for an angry billionaire who spends his time lambasting the political system as a cabal of corrupt insiders (despite serving as finance minister for the past four years). His great champion, President Milos Zeman, is a hard-living, Putin-loving boor who this week brandished a mock AK-47 bearing the inscription “For journalists”. The new parliament will be chock-full of anti-system parties (see article), including Mr Babis’s ANO. What makes the Czechs so cranky?

One clue might lie in unreasonable expectations about what EU membership could bring the ex-communist countries of Europe. Nearly 30 years after 1989, wages in the Czech Republic are 40% that of neighbouring Germany. A related gripe is a perceived sniffiness from the West, expressed in exaggerated central European fears that food multinationals are dumping second-rate products on to their markets. The European Commission’s response to eastern jitters has been to insist that all EU projects, such as the single currency, should be open to all EU countries, not just the usual suspects in the West. But in non-euro countries like the Czech Republic, even mentioning euro membership sounds like a haughty warning to join, or be left behind.

Emmanuel Macron takes a different approach. Over the summer France’s president toured central Europe, glad-handing friendly leaders while shunning Messrs Orban and Kaczynski. This divide-and-conquer stratagem paid off handsomely this week when the Czechs and Slovaks broke ranks with a group of eastern European countries to back a tightening of cross-border labour rules inside the EU, a totemic issue for Mr Macron. Today France’s relations with Poland are at rock-bottom. But things are going swimmingly with the Czechs.

The morrow would obliterate the plans of today

What does unite the populists of the east is the fragility of the institutions around them. Political parties come and go with alarming speed, often, as with ANO, merely serving as vehicles for the interests of an individual or small group. Bureaucracies may be malleable to political caprice. Media and civil society may not have the strength or independence to check leaders’ excesses.

Mr Orban has exploited these weaknesses to reshape Hungary’s institutions to serve his Fidesz party and its cronies, while railing against “globalists” like George Soros, a Hungarian-born financier, and the European officials who supposedly dance to his drum. Mr Kaczynski, despite holding no government post, has embarked on a messianic mission to reinvent the Polish state to correct what he considers the injustices of the post-1989 settlement. Both men lead parties that dominate opinion polls, crowd out opponents and foul the air.

The Czech system has its own fissures, but Mr Babis poses a different sort of threat. The risk is not of an ideological reshaping of the state, but of weak institutions failing to restrain oligarchic rule. Mr Babis, the second-richest person in the Czech Republic, has vast agricultural and industrial holdings (though he has placed them in a trust) and two newspapers. In his modestly titled book What I Dream Of When I Happen To Be Sleeping, he proposes scrapping checks on power, like the Senate or town councils. Lacking a majority in parliament, Mr Babis cannot inflict too much damage. But Milan Nic, an analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations, worries about who may follow in his wake.

Certainly, Mr Babis and his kind warrant a certain vigilance. But Europe need not gird itself for Habsburg mutiny. There is no tidal wave of revolutionary populism washing over the east. That is just as well, for managing the swirling eddies of central Europe’s politics presents enough of a challenge.