Petőcz Kálmán (szerk.): National Populism and Slovak - Hungarian Relations in Slovakia 2006-2009 (Somorja, 2009)

Kálmán Petőcz: National Populism and Electoral Behaviour

National Populism and Electoral Behaviour

Michalovce is likely to have a different ethnic make-up than the town of Veiké Kapušany.

Sometimes, the ambiguity of demarcating the ethnically mixed (Slovak- Hungarian) territory leads to interchanging and confusing of both concepts. A very valuable and pioneering publication titled Mýty a kontramýty [Myths and Counter-Myths] that examined the roots of tensions between Slovaks and Hungarians on ethnically mixed territories used the term of ‘southern Slovakia’ as a synonym for the territory dominated by ethnic Hungarians." But when explaining the applied methodology several pages later, the same publication described the ethnically mixed territory of southern Slovakia as 11 border districts plus the Galanta district, i.e. districts as enacted before 1996 in which ethnic Hungarians made up more than 10% of the population.12 The same definition of ethnically mixed territory of southern Slovakia was used by another interesting study titled Problém soužití Slovákú a Madam na Slovensku v polovine 90. let [The Problem of Slovak-Hungarian Coexistence in Slovakia in the Mid-1990s] (Frič 1999, p. 219). Sociologist Vladimír Krivý also describes the ethnically mixed territory as all districts where ethnic Hungarians make up over 10% of the population (Krivý, 2007). A joint project carried out by the National Educational Centre and the Forum Institute for Minority Research that examined the culture of coexistence on the ethnically mixed territory of southern Slovakia used a slightly different methodology, focusing only on those districts where representation of ethnic Hungarians exceeded 25% (please see Lampl, 2008, p. 81)."

Map 2 shows the share of ethnic Hungarians on the population of the southern districts of Slovakia based on the 2001 population census. I complete the data shown on this map by the following figures: in 2001, Slovakia had 551 municipalities inhabited by at least 100 ethnic Hungarians; in 410 of those municipalities (i.e. 74%), ethnic Hungarians constituted a majority. The number of ethnic Hungarians in these municipalities totalled 396,214, which means that 77% of all ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia inhabited municipalities in which they formed a majority.1,1

So, for the purposes of our study, the ethnically mixed territory is a region relatively clearly demarcated by the line of Bratislava - Senec - Galanta - Nové Zámky - Levice — Velký Krtíš — Lučenec — Rožňava - Košice on the north and Slovakia’s state border on the south, plus the alluvial plain formed by Bodrog and Uh rivers. This territory, which Hungarian-language expert literature usually refers to as magyarlakta terület, or territory inhabited by Hungarians, shelters approximately 90% of all ethnic Hungarians living in Slovakia.

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