Petőcz Kálmán (szerk.): National Populism and Slovak - Hungarian Relations in Slovakia 2006-2009 (Somorja, 2009)
Peter Učen: Approaching National Populism
Peter Učeň lism, overall, it remains debatable to what extent was national populism in Slovakia discredited in the eyes of its citizens. After the parliamentary elections in 2006 a coalition came to power containing the two prominent actors of the era of national populism of the previous decade - the populist radical right SNS and the post-national-populist HZDS. This fact, along with the alleged nationalism of the pivotal coalition party SMER-Social Democracy, provoked the thoughts as to whether Slovakia was experiencing the revival of the national populism. The concern is certainly a relevant one but it should be addressed while taking into account the changed context into which the politics of the new coalition unveils itself. First, both the HZDS and SNS learned the lesson that national populism incurs severe costs on domestic, but mainly on international level. They experienced the eight years in opposition as a direct consequence of defying those obvious facts in the 1990s. The SNS, in addition having gone through a protracted era of infightings and organizational disunity, kept its radicalism largely under control in spite of habitual verbal attacks on enemies of the Slovak nation. Currently, the party seems to be intensively engaged in the “consumption” of the spoils of power, which puts additional limits on its nativist radicalism.22 With a little bit of exaggeration, if it were not for regular fierce declarations and utterances of the party leader Ján Slota, directed almost exclusively against Hungary and SMK-MKP, many Slovaks might have got an impression the radical right nationalism is absent from the country’s politics.21 It is, however, possible that nativism of SNS is in a dormant stage, ‘waiting for immigrants’ to unleash itself in a form much more similar to the nativism of the populist radical right in the West. Considering the HZDS, we hold that starting from approximately 2000, the party developed into a largely ideologically empty political vehicle serving to provide a political leverage and impunity to its leader. To be sure, the “parenthood” of the Slovak nation-state became a central element of its appeal but currently it is free from radicalism as well as any potential to attract an additional vote. Second, when it comes to the nationalism of SMER, several issues have been discussed, such as Robert Fico’s ‘personal’ nationalist proclivity, or the presence of the ‘left nationalists’ within the party.24 We assume that SMER also got the lesson of HZDS and SNS. Rather than contemplating the nationalism of SMER - which we consider largely instrumental to her bashing of establishment and law and order radicalism - we suggest paying attention to the nature of their neo-populism. 32
