NATIONALIST POPULISM AND POST-COMMUNISM

Summary The attractiveness of ethnicity, nationalism and the related issues to a country’s population, together with their large mobilisation potential, have continuously presented a challenge for the political elite in Central and Eastern Europe. The instrumental use of these issues in communication strategies with the electorate has become an important tool for voter mobilisation. Along with the changing geopolitical reality in the post-Soviet space, prejudices against historical “others” have been rediscovered. At the same time, new “others” were invented. These recently invented enemies, together with the mythological “ghosts of the past”, quickly became popular points of reference for a significant part of the political elite in the CEE countries, including Poland and Slovakia. In this research study, there are three main tasks. The first aim is to identify and further analyse nationalist populist appeals in the Polish and Slovak political discourse in the period of the post-communist transition, through a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the party slogans and media statements of representatives of the political elite. More generally, the analysis of the political communication is aimed at presenting an unconventional but complementary contribution to the study of political culture, especially in the countries undergoing a political, economic and social transformation. Even though language, as such, is not the only factor that characterises political culture, it can certainly serve as a valuable indicator of its state. The second task is to conduct a cross-country comparison, in order to highlight the similarities and differences between the Polish and Slovak political discourses in terms of the presence and usage of nationalist populist appeals. Apart from comparing quantitative aspects, such as the number of nationalist populist statements in the political discourse or the number of political parties employing nationalist populist rhetoric in their communication strategies, the qualitative similarities and differences are assessed, especially in relation to the thematic orientation of particular discourses. The finally task is to provide a cross-time comparison, which should underline the dynamics of changes in both the Polish and Slovak political discourses during the course of ten years. The analysis of the political discourse in Poland and Slovakia is expected to show that a significant part of the political elite in Poland and Slovakia is inclined to employ nationalist populism in their statements and party slogans, in order to address their voters and enlarge their volume of support. The advantage of nationalist populist appeals is based on the fact that they are easily usable for a number of purposes and reach a significant part of the population. Even though the main focus of such appeals is the nation, most of the political

7