Petőcz Kálmán (szerk.): National Populism and Slovak - Hungarian Relations in Slovakia 2006-2009 (Somorja, 2009)
Kálmán Petőcz: National Populism and Electoral Behaviour
Kálmán Petőcz 2009; however, the situation was slightly different on the level of towns. Between 2006 and 2009, the nationalist bloc’s position worsened especially in Rožňava, Moldava nad Bodvou but also in Veiké Kapušany. On the other hand, it preserved its dominance in towns of the Novohrad region and in western parts of the Gemer region. Plausible explanations include local inhabitants’ generally difficult socio-economic situation and volatile voting patterns of local Roma that have been previously illustrated on the example of villages with high shares of Romany population. The previous analysis justifies some preliminary conclusions. Most importantly, a superficial glimpse on aggregated election results from districts with ethnically mixed population may lead to an erroneous conclusion that voter support for parties of the national-populist bloc among Slovak voters inhabiting ethnically mixed territories of southern Slovakia is significantly lower than among Slovak voters from the north. As our analysis hopefully demonstrated, it is not entirely so. Nevertheless, an observation can be made that overall voter support for these parties has shown a declining trend since 2006, particularly in larger towns. This conclusion is seemingly contradicted by the results of the most recent elections to regional self-governance bodies in November 2009 in which the civic-rightist bloc recorded only one ‘net’ victory by clinching the post of the Bratislava self-governance region’s governor and lost a number of seats in regional parliaments across the country compared to 2005; however, we believe that one ought to be very cautious when interpreting these election results - for a number of reasons. Most importantly, voter participation was very low, barely exceeding 20%. Various bizarre coalitions were formed and various untraditional backstage agreements were concluded in Trnava, Nitra, Banská Bystrica and Košice regions that include territories populated by ethnic Hungarians. This peculiar election tactics brought about distortions that make it impossible to assess the actual power ratio between the civic-rightist and the national-socialist bloc in these regions. To conclude this section, we intend to analyze in detail voting patterns of Slovak voters from four towns in southern Slovakia, i.e. Šamorín/Somorja, Komámo/Komárom, Tornala/Tomalja and Kráľovský Chlmec/Királyhelmec. They were selected based on the following criteria. Two of these towns are located in south-western Slovakia. One of them - namely Samorin - is in the capital Bratislava’s zone of influence. The other one - namely Komárno - is a traditional cultural and symbolic centre of ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia, although it also has a relatively strong and conscious Slovak community that comprises ‘ancient Komámoans’, post-war repatriates from Hungary, descendants of Slovaks (or Czechs) who settled 152
