NATIONALIST POPULISM AND POST-COMMUNISM

specific experience with growing international isolation, and lagging behind in the integration processes with her neighbours during the years of the Mečiar government. Therefore, the integration process became not only a priority for all the parliamentary political parties, but was a matter of consensus among them. On the other hand, the Polish political parties opposing the integration into the EU maintained their negative attitudes due to the fact that public opinion on this issue was more divided when compared to the Slovak case. The EU’s influence on both the Polish and Slovak political discourses was also indirect. It can be argued that the EU’s conditionality made the political elite use moderate language in the discourse. This observation is valid in both the Polish and Slovak cases. Another general observation is that the language used in the party programmes is more moderate than in the case of the media statements. However, it has to be underlined that by using more moderate language in the party programmes, political leaders did not lose much. In order to address their supporters with nationalist populist appeals they usually used other, more effective channels, such as party meetings or media statements. As mentioned above, the EU integration was accompanied by a liberalisation of the economy and opening of the domestic market to foreign traders and investors. This process of economic liberalisation stimulated privatisation and allowed foreign companies to enter the Polish and Slovak labour markets. Therefore, populism exploiting economic nationalism became an influential political instrument in the hands of the left-oriented and conservative parties in both countries. The claim that the government was “selling out” national property gathered in the course of the previous decades was one of the crucial arguments used in order to attract the attention of potential voters. While in the case of Poland, the issue of EU accession overshadowed the importance of the so-called traditional “others” – Germans, Russian and even Jews – in the case of Slovakia the situation was different. Polish-Russian and Polish-German relations were not marked by any significant problems in 2001. Moreover, even though the Polish discourse was – due to the debate on the book of Jan Tomasz Gross – significantly characterised by the issue of Polish-Jewish relations, constructive attitudes towards the reconciliation prevailed over the attempts by some minor political players to exploit this issue for their narrow political interests. Slovak-Hungarian relations, including the minority issue and the so-called Hungarian threat, were by far the most dominant issue in the Slovak political discourse. The Hungarians not only took part in the Slovak government, which made them automatically the most visible “others”, but moreover, the bilateral relations between the Slovak Republic and Republic of Hungary suffered from several crises caused by the unilateral declarations and actions of Viktor Orbán’s government.

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