Petőcz Kálmán (szerk.): National Populism and Slovak - Hungarian Relations in Slovakia 2006-2009 (Somorja, 2009)
Peter Učen: Approaching National Populism
Peter Učeň hority are to be punished severely. In this interpretation, authoritarianism includes law and order and ‘punitive conventional moralism’... It does not necessarily mean an antidemoctratic attitude, but neither does it preclude one” (Mudde 2007, 23, our emphasis). Authoritarian nature of the PRR politics explains, among other things, many secondary and derived characteristics of PRR linked to its organizational forms and leadership style. The final indispensable ideological core concept of PRR is populism conceived as “a thin-centred ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people” (Mudde 2007, 23, our emphasis). Even intuitively, it is not hard to understand how and why this ideological combination - a version of ‘identity politics’ promoted by the PRR - is so alien to the European liberal-democratic mainstream. In the context of Slovakia, only the Slovak National Party (SNS), and the defunct true Slovak National Party (PSNS), can be classified as the populist radical right. Given that SNS does not exhaust the class of Slovak political forces that espouse both populism and nationalism, we have to continue our search for the meaning of the Slovak national populism in other quarters as well. PopuliSM ilN FOCUS Traditionally, populism used to be conceived as politics alien and inimical to liberal democracy. In the recent decades an attitude has slightly shifted towards seeing populism more as a phenomenon, in one way or another, pertaining to democracy: as its ‘inextricable companion’, its shadow, its pathology, or an eternal possibility within it. Before offering our preferred definition of populism, various approaches need to be mentioned here at least in passing. Against the backdrop of rather authoritarian rule exercised by some ‘classical’ populists in Latin America in the middle of the 20,h century, populism used to be defined resorting to cumulative generalisations drawn from 1) the contents of (social and economic) policies of populists, 2) social composition of constituencies supporting them (namely multi-class coalitions), and, 3) the way populist leaders appealed to those constituencies. Populism was presented as an authoritarian anti-western politics engaged in statist and redistributive socio-economic policies (‘socialism’) and as a 16
