In Central and Eastern Europe, "the West" is utilized as a politicized symbol resulting from the historical and geopolitical conditions. This context led to the development of different, even opposed, political narratives employed simultaneously by multiple sides of the political spectrum. The paper explores the evolution of narratives about "the West" in political elite discourse over the last 30 years, as illustrated in their party electoral programmes. Using an interpretative approach and computational text analysis methods, I identify four main meanings: "something they aspire to", "something they are part of", "something they are not fully part of", and "something they consider a threat". This inductive categorization is then extended using a supervised topic model (BERT-NLI) to over 17 thousand sentences that contain references to "the West", Western countries or international organizations in 291 party manifestos from 10 Central and Eastern European countries. The manuscript subsequently studies cross-sectional and over-time variation in adopted narratives, highlighting the importance of parties’ overall ideological positions and their countries’ relationship to the European Union.