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 ones; finally, ethnic Hungarian voters are more rural than Slovak ones and voter participation in small villages is traditionally slightly higher than in larger towns. For the sake of comparison, Graph 8 illustrates changes in voting patterns of ethnic Hungarian voters from Bajtava, a small village where ethnic Hungarians make up close to 100%. It is plain to see that voting patterns of these voters are relatively stable and do not experience as rapid fluctuations as in four examined towns. Generally speaking, here the election results of SMK-MKP correspond to ethnic Hungarians’ share of the local population, which means that SMK-MKP always receives almost 100% of the popular vote here. But there are even more factors that made national election results of SMK-MKP in two most recent parliamentary elections exceed ethnic Hungarians’ overall share on Slovakia’s population. As Zsuzsanna Lampl pointed out in a separate chapter featured in the present publication, the total number of persons who officially declare their Hungarian nationality is lower than the total number of those who view themselves as ethnic Hungarians. The one hard figure we may cite here is a difference between persons who declare Hungarian nationality and persons who view Hungarian as their mother tongue. In the 2001 population census, the total number of those who declared Hungarian to be their native language was by approximately 30,000 higher than the total number of those who declared themselves as ethnic Hungarians. The election performance of SMK-MKP may have been improved to a certain extent by Slovak voters. As the author of this chapter pointed out in one of his previous studies (Petőcz, 2007), ‘pure’ Slovaks’ contribution to SMK-MKP’s overall election result in 2006 (11.68%) was approximately 0.5% of the popural vote. This chapter does not offer the necessary space for a detailed description of how we came to this conclusion. One thing is for sure, though: public statements presented by some SMK-MKP leaders that ethnic Slovak voters may have improved their party’s overall election result by 1.5 to 2 percent of the popular vote were quite exaggerated. This hypothesis may be corroborated by the fact that voting patterns according to ethnic criteria grew stronger in the most recent parliamentary elections. It may be further corroborated by the results of elections to regional self-governance organs in November 2009. In June 2009, SMK-MKP split up, giving birth to a new party called Most-Hid [Bridge] led by former SMK-MKP Chairman Béla Bugár. As a would-be bridge between Slovaks and ethnic Hungarians, the party commissioned a relatively intense campaign even on purely Slovak-language territories in hopes of attracting a relevant share of Slovak voters’ votes; however, election results did 159
