Frontiers of hatred? A study of right-wing populist strategies in Slovakia

ABSTRACT

The article examines political strategies of the Slovak extreme right by drawing on theories of populism developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. It performs an analysis of the discourse of the far-right People's Party Our Slovakia (ĽSNS). Its key finding is that ĽSNS discourse constructs an array of radical borders (frontiers) between the so-called ‘decent people’ and the multiple, but often unrelated, alleged threats, such as foreigners, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, the political establishment or the clandestine ‘global elites’. Multiple frontiers are woven together into an overarching conspiracy-minded narrative of the ‘system’ threatening the ‘people’, thus making the ĽSNS strategy an intrinsically populist one.

KEYWORDS:

• Central Europe
• extreme right
• Kotleba
• LGBT
• multiculturalism
• populism
• Roma
• Slovakia

Acknowledgement

I would like to express my gratitude to Oľga Gyárfášová and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on the article draft.

Notes

1 By using this term, I am not referring to Ronald Inglehart's specific concept of ‘post-materialism’, but only to the fact that Laclau and Mouffe in their theory of discourse (2001) depart from economic determinism which characterizes classical Marxism and, to some extent, neo-Marxist thought.

2 In common parlance the term ‘Slovak State’ is typically used to denote the wartime Slovak client of Nazi Germany whereas ‘Slovak Republic’ or ‘Slovakia’ refers to the post-Communist Slovakia, independent since the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993.

3 A reference to Ľudoviť Štúr (1815–1856), a renowned leader of the 19th century Slovak national revival movement and the codifier of the standard Slovak langauge. In his later works, Štúr expressed deep skepticism of what he saw as the morally decadent West and favored a union of Slavic nations under the leadership of Russia.