Why are parties that call themselves "Centre" almost always actually right wing?

[Lord Halifax]

I mean Eastern Europe is a special case in that the party systems are usually formed down different lines rather than the usual left/right class thing; so the "centre" might be talking about another issue.  There's also the fact that parties there aren't usually based on ideology and are basically vehicles for their leaders to get into power; so they are more than happy to flit around on the spectrum to get votes and get into government; plus you'll get parties that rise from nowhere; win elections and then collapse in the next election four years later (Res Publica and Pro Patria in Estonia are good examples of that; they merged recently which is funny plus I think that the Lithuanian fake Greens will do that as well) which you don't see in more established democracies.  To use Estonia as another example; the two "big" parties (Reform Party and the Centre Party) are both vaguely liberal and actually sit in the same European Parliament group (ALDE; although that's a bit of a wide group) yet they don't like each other and won't serve in government with each other since the latter is the Russian party and the former has used that to get support from amongst more nationalist parts of the Estonian population.

Ten years ago isn't really recent...

Reform is a right wing Liberal party and very much class based. Its the party of the urban upper middle class and its voters has the highest income, wealth and education of all, whereas Centre is a populist catch-all party with the Russians as a special constituency. It doesn't make sense to call Centre a Liberal party.

[Lord Halifax]

Cor was it really that long ago - I wrote my dissertation on ethnic minority politics in the Baltic States and it was recent when I wrote it...

I wouldn't call Russians merely a "special constituency" of the Centre Party; they are a significant portion if not a majority of the Centre Party vote; basically the entirely of their core support.  I think that now Savisaar has gone they might find it easier to build support amongst ethnic Estonians although its hard to say - they have a good lead in the polls though.  Centre certainly are populist and try to present themselves as all things to everyone and it makes it hard to characterise exactly what they are (which is the case for most parties in the region mind; the Estonian Social Democrats aren't particularly Social Democratic for example) and I think that the term "Liberal" is vague enough to characterise it: although certainly most of the other parties are more to the right on economy-related matters.  Its certainly not really your typical modern Centre Party; its actually probably closer to how they used to me in Nordic countries before they either moved to the far right or decided to support right wing governments consistently.

Liberal is primarily an economic term in European politics, and they are the least economically liberal of the major parties and also fairly SoCon (at least more than Reform and the Social Democrats).

The Norwegian Centre Party support Labour. None of the Nordic centre parties are far right.