Patriots or Nationalists? The Ideology and Support of the Slovak National Party

Since the year 1989 the post-communist countries have gone through a huge transformation process. These changes affected many areas including the politics, economy, culture and many others. This unique experience had its impact also on their party systems. As the party competition was again possible, new parties were created, though they did not fully resemble their counterparts in the Western countries. The radical right parties are no exemption here. They did not respond to the same challenges as the parties in the states of the Western Europe but they found their specific areas of interest, mostly connected with previous historical circumstances and experience. Altogether the radical right parties in the post-communist area represent a topic which is worth of particular interest. The paper attempts to analyze one of such cases – the Slovak National Party (SNS) in respect to its ideology and electoral results in the country’s primary elections which are elections to the Slovak parliament. The goal is to identify the main features of the party’s ideology and its development. When dealing with electoral results the aim is to find the patterns of electoral support of SNS and its changes over time. Based on the available data the intent is also to identify the characteristics of the voters of SNS. The paper will cover the time period from the early 90s until presence. The reason for choosing SNS is quite straightforward as it is the only radical right party in Slovakia which succeeded in gaining and keeping relevancy and also repeatedly holding the executive power.