From Opposition to Permanent Governmental Participation and a Dual Strategy of an Ethnic Tribune Party – The Transformation of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (DAHR)

Parties of national minorities like the DAHR can be approached from the perspective of the literature on both ethnoregionalist and ethnic parties. While the former strand focuses more on the goals concerning the transformation of the state and the policy output of the parties, the latter approach highlights the inclination of such parties to maintain clientelistic networks, with the aim of extracting state resources for their ethnically defined following. In this paper we assess the trade-offs the DAHR’s had to face concerning office and policy in the context of the emergence of rival ethnic parties within the Hungarian community, using various data sources – including surveys, elite interviews and content analysis of the press. The main argument is that the shift towards a more office-oriented behavior has largely contributed to the emergence of rival ethnic parties, which advocated a return to the original policy goals, mainly centered around minority rights and obtaining various forms of autonomy. In turn, DAHR reacted to this by adopting a dual discourse: while maintaining a more conciliatory tone towards Romanian parties, the language of communication within the Hungarian community shifted back to a more intransigent rhetoric. The phenomenon is similar to that of “ethnic tribune parties” described by Mitchell, Evans and O’Leary in the context of Northern Ireland, which pictured the parties as simultaneously able to be pragmatic for the sake of securing governmental resources and to maintain their image as the strongest protectors of their ethnic group. While such a shift of strategy permitted the DAHR to parry the electoral challenge in compact Hungarian-populated areas, in territories where Hungarians live dispersed this shift triggered increased voting across ethnic lines among the Hungarians, as the more intransigent rhetoric seems to alienate that part of the minority which is better integrated into the majority society.