And perhaps not coincidentally, the mirror line down the middle is the one that used to be called the Iron Curtain, which is about to disappear as the European Union finally expands.
While fears of immigration fuel a flight to the right in the West, in increasingly comfortable ex-communist Europe voters have been turning to pro-EU center-left parties in recent elections.
"Across Central Europe elections have also recently become referendums on joining the EU," said political analyst Jiri Pehe.
"There's a mirror image in the sense that in Western Europe rightwing parties are winning in part because of disappointment with the EU and too rapid EU integration," he added.
In the Czech Republic on June 16, the Social Democrats scored a clear victory over the conservative Civic Democrats of former Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus, who had been seeking a political comeback.
In Western Europe the rise of the right, and more alarmingly the far-right, is a well-known phenomenon.
Austria's Joerg Haider could claim to have started the trend, when his Freedom Party took office in a coalition in February 2000, sparking unprecedented EU sanctions which had to be abandoned after seven months.
More recently, France's Jean-Marie Le Pen triggered a political earthquake by beating Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin into third place in presidential polls.
He was soundly defeated in the run-off against Jacques Chirac. But legislative elections in France on June 16, which produced a historic win for Chirac's newly-formed party, again demonstrate the tide to the right.
Italy is the other obvious example of the rightward drift, while the success in Denmark of Pim Fortuyn's party was apparently boosted further by his untimely death. In Germany, polls are giving hope to conservative candidate Edmund Stoiber ahead of elections in September.
In the East, the flow is completely in the opposite direction.
The Czech vote - which also saw a spectacular surge by the communists, who scored nearly 19 percent - followed similar moves in countries from the Baltics to the Balkans.
Romania, for example, voted in the ex-communist Social Democrats at the end of 2000, while Balkan neighbor Bulgaria replaced conservatives with people-friendly ex-King Simeon Saxe-Coburg in June 2001.
EU candidate heavyweight Poland were the next to go, with Social Democrat Prime Minister Leszek Miller taking office last November, after Warsaw's Baltic neighbor Lithuania turned left in July 2001.
The most recent example was in Hungary, another leading EU candidate state hoping to join the Union in 2004, where Socialist Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy took office after ousting conservatives in April polls. In fact, the division between left and right in eastern Europe, as well as in Western Europe is increasingly confused.
In many cases Social Democrats are actually more freemarket and reformist, pushing through privatization for example, than conservative-labeled parties.
"The Social Democrat parties tend to be more competent. Many are former communist parties with a lot of political professionals in their ranks who know how to implement things," said Pehe.
In addition the political right tends to be fragmented in ex-communist countries. In summary, "the political right has been very good at rhetoric, but not very good at actually doing things," said Pehe.
The next test of Central Europe turning Social Democrat may be a difficult one: in September Slovakia goes to the polls, with former nationalist Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar well ahead in opinion polls. Interestingly, Movement for a Democratic Slovakia leader Meciar describes himself as center-left.
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