Actors, agenda, and appeal of the radical nationalist right in Slovakia

Ballots and barricades enhanced: far‐right ‘movement parties’ and movement‐electoral interactions

“…Looking more concretely at movement parties of the far right, the Ľudová Strana – Naše Slovensko (ĽSNS, since 2015 known as Kotleba – Ľudová Strana Naše Slovensko ) in Slovakia has mobilised on ‘Gypsy terror’ and ‘Roma criminality’, directly drawing upon the prior activities of the Slovenská Pospolitosť (SP) movement – with which the ĽSNS maintains direct ideological and organisational continuity (Gyárfášová and Mesežnikov ; Milo ). Whilst serving a functional proactive component, this strategy also contributed to steal thunder to the more popular Slovenská Národná Strana (SNS), which in turn curbed the most contentious aspects of its nativist rhetoric under the leadership of Andrej Danko (Pirro ).…”

How Do They Get In? Radical Parties and Government Participation in European Democracies

“…As emphasized by Paul Warwick (1996), considerable parliamentary strength is a liability rather than an asset when it comes to prospective coalition partners’ chances of getting into office. Instead of large parties, the formateur party (henceforth the prime minister party) 2 tends – in order to maximize both its own influence and the working capacity of the coalition – to prefer medium-sized partners (see de Lange 2008 and, especially, Olsen et al 2010a) such as, for example, the Finnish Left Alliance (in coalition 1995–2003, see Dunphy 2010) or the Slovak National Party (in coalition 2006–10, see Gyárfašová and Mesežnikov 2015). Accordingly, my first expectation is: if the parliamentary strength of the radical right (left) party is moderate – that is, neither minuscule nor huge – the party will gain access to government .…”

“…Regarding the radical right, previous research shows that political affinity between the radical right party and the prime minister party, especially on sociocultural issues, can open up possibilities for radical right government participation. In Poland (2005) and Slovakia (2006), for example, the prime minister parties (the conservative populist Law and Justice and the social democratic Direction, respectively) shared similar restrictive views on nationalism and xenophobia to their radical right coalition partners League of Polish Families and Slovak National Party (Gyárfášová and Mesežnikov 2015; Kasprowicz 2015). A similar pattern can be observed on the left.…”

The effect of radical right fringe parties on main parties in Central and Eastern Europe: Empirical evidence from manifesto data

“…This caused competing historical narratives, unfulfilled national aspirations while increasing the salience of ethnic or religious cleavages within these societies (Henderson, 2008; Hloušek and Kopeček, 2008; Minkenberg, 2010, 2015). In fact, as Minkenberg (2015: 41) argues, “[traditional and] new cleavages do not structure party competition in a stable fashion, except for the ethnic cleavage […].” The role of collective identities, especially ethnic ones, has been central to understanding party competition in CEE and “the subject of dozens of studies analysing transitional developments in post-communist countries” (Gyárfášová and Mesežnikov, 2015: 224). Thus, historical grievances and imagined or genuine national traumas continue to serve as sociocultural sources of political contestation (Minkenberg, 2015: 27–42).…”