Success of the Far Right in the 2020 Slovak Parliamentary Election within the European Context

Abstract

Purpose and Originality: The paper analyzes the results of the 2020 parliamentary election in Slovakia using the theoretical framework of Norris and Inglehart (2019). The general trend of increasing support for the strongly authoritarian populist parties in the EU and in Visegrad 4 countries in particular suggest that the far right parties should be successful. Is this the case or are the wining parties defined in some other way?

Method: The position of each party on the libertarian – authoritarian axis is evaluated on the basis of secondary analysis of CHES 2014, CHES 2017 and 2019 EES studies. Ideological blocks of parties are subsequently compared in terms of their electoral success.

Results: Libertarian parties suffered a crushing defeat and did not manage to challenge the ideological dominance of authoritarianism in Slovakia, established after the 2016 election. But this did not automatically translate into victory of the far right. Slovakia did not join its neighbors to the south and north in the Visegrad 4. Instead, parties, which were defined mainly by their strong populist appeal were the real winners.

Society: The paper is trying to add to the research on the far right and of the authoritarian populism by noticing similarities between Slovak political trends and development in the advanced World.

Limitations / further research: The article is using limited data resources, which in turn limited how much insight into political development it was able offer. It was for example not able to sufficiently explain why the voters chose socially conservative populist parties and why did the more liberal parties fail. It also had quite narrow focus on specific policy issue areas, and did not focus others such as foreign policy, which could be a subject of future research.