Petőcz Kálmán (szerk.): National Populism and Slovak - Hungarian Relations in Slovakia 2006-2009 (Somorja, 2009)
Peter Učen: Approaching National Populism
Peter Učeň 1980s and 1990s, when their political presence proved to be sustainable and its access to power attainable. Various approaches have attributed to the parties concerned - in different ways, combinations, and with various degree of accuracy - a range of defining features, such as extremism, nationalism, anti-democracy, xenophobia, racism, authoritarianism, protest, populism, economic neo-liberalism, welfare chauvinism, anti-immigrant attitude, and the like. Why, then, did national populism become so common a shortcut for the politics of the radical right? That ‘given’ name certainly reflects the nature of the threat the parties in question pose to the mainstream politics. Hence it also speaks volumes about those who have bestowed the name rather than about solely the referent itself - the parties of the radical, populist, authoritarian and nationalist right. While none of the above attributes of the radical right has been new to European politics, upsetting novelty of the radical right was a combination of those attributes and their resonance among some segments of electorate. In order to understand the nature of the radical threat, we have to see into a number of assumptions underlying the post-war European consensus. In a typical Western European polity, the left (the Socialists or Social Democrats), by and large, converged with the right (the Christian Democrats or the Conservatives) on liberal democratic norms of the form and contents of their respective national politics, on the welfare state as the basis for eliminating social unrest in societies (social equalisation as an addition to the equality of rights), and on a gradual and negotiated transfer of some prerogatives from the nation-states (and their governments) to the supranational level of the European Union. A full account goes far beyond the scope of this text, but it might be useful to introduce some facts testifying the nature of the radical right challenge: In terms of citizenship, they started to call for its reinterpretation in nativist terms; it defied the notion of citizenship as a result of merely legal procedures. That was more than just a response to the influx of immigrants from diverse cultures to western societies. Relative to the form and contents of politics, the radical right came to employ in its appeals the whole range of topics that were considered off-agenda until then, such as ‘sanctity’ of liberal rights removed from the sphere of popular vote. Finally, concerning European integration, it was persistently portrayed by the radical right as a danger to the true national interest. As for ‘national populism’, populism became a shortcut for all anti-liberal elements of the radical right politics, namely its disregard for established norms of political conduct, denigration of elites and the way they represent 14
