Petőcz Kálmán (szerk.): National Populism and Slovak - Hungarian Relations in Slovakia 2006-2009 (Somorja, 2009)
Authors
I Political development in Central European countries took a peculiar turn after their accession to the European Union in 2004 but especially after a series of national elections in 2005 and 2006. They put in driver’s seat politicians whose mode of expression, style of pursuing political goals and attitude to political opponents was - to say the least - unusual for suave politicians from Western European saloons. Analysts, journalists and civic activists openly began to speak of the rise of new populism. The present publication is one of the outputs of a project titled Challenging National Populism and Promoting Interethnic Tolerance and Understanding in Slovakia that was carried out by the Forum Institute for Minority Research in Šamorin. Its main goal was not to make just another contribution to the theoretical discourse for we believe that the phenomenon of populism has been relatively thoroughly described by a great number of authors. A partial list of their works is included in the bibliography at the end of this publication. The principal ambition of the collective of authors of this book was to examine a specific form of populism that is frequently referred to as national populism. In Slovakia, the nationalist scion of populism emerged in the mid-1990s and was closely related to the name of Vladimír Mečiar. On the pinnacle of his political career Mečiar managed to convince the critical mass of the Slovak electorate that he was the best safeguard able to protect the Slovak nation against the triple threat of national doom: first, against the Czechs regarding the constitutional model of the dying Czechoslovak federation and just division of its common goods; second, against the Hungarians regarding Slovakia’s territorial integrity and political sovereignty and elimination of discrimination against Slovaks on ethnically mixed territories; finally, against multinational corporations, international institutions and all capitalists from abroad who in conspiracy with ethnic Hungarians and other internal enemies of the state (i.e. political opposition, NGOs and the media) tried to undermine the economy, security and political independence of the young and fragile Slovak Republic. After the parliamentary elections of 2006 brought to power the mling coalition of Smer-SD -SNS - ĽS-HZDS, many analysts gained an impression that Slovakia was again embracing national populism as the key vehicle of political campaigning and rivalry we remember from the 1990s. Is it truly so, or are we dealing with some ‘softer’ and harmless version of national populism that produces smoke rather than fire?
