Both fascist and communist? Socialist and clero-fascist authoritarian nostalgia(s) and vote for PRR parties in Slovakia.

The turbulent history of Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century meant that some countries suffered under authoritarian regimes led by right-wing and left-wing parties. Slovakia, for example, experienced far-right authoritarianism during the 1939-1944 period of the Tiso-ruled Slovak state, which ended just before the end of the Second World War. Just four years later, Slovakia, then part of Czechoslovakia, saw the Czechoslovak Communist Party seize power and establish a socialist dictatorship that lasted more than forty years. Today, Populist Radical-Right parties in Slovakia (i.e. Republika, Slovak National Party, and People's Party Our Slovakia) have emphasized the positive aspect of the Slovak State period and portrayed it as a golden age for Slovakia (Slovakia’s first period as an independent state, law and order, traditional values, etc.). Beyond the admiration for the clero-fascist Nazi puppet state, in recent years some Slovak PRR parties and their voters have also begun to show an increased appreciation for the socialist regime. This change in attitude of the Slovak PRR parties from a clearly anti-communist and filo-fascist position in the 1990s to a much more communist-tolerant view today has often been attributed to the parties' closeness to Russia. This dissonance between anti-communism and pro-Russianness is a challenge for the Slovak PRR parties and has led to these parties and their voters having contradictory attitudes towards the socialist period. How do nostalgia for the clero-fascist Slovak state and socialist Czechoslovakia influence contemporary voting for PRR parties? Which factors mediate this process? In this paper, I aim to answer these research questions empirically, using two nationally representative surveys conducted in Slovakia (2024 and 2025) and regression analyses. Preliminary results (based only on nostalgia of the communist period, as views on the Slovak State will be only available in the early 2025 survey) indicate that PRR voters are significantly more likely than the majority of the Slovak population to view the socialist period positively and to argue that the socialist period was better than today's democratic system. Surprisingly, a comparison of PRR voters only with voters of the (very proudly) communist-nostalgic SMER party shows that PRR voters in Slovakia are as likely as SMER voters to say that the socialist system was better than the current system, and have only slightly less positive evaluations of the socialist system than SMER voters. Future research plans include: (1) exploring differences in support and positive evaluations of the Tiso-led Slovak state between PRR voters and the general population, and between PRR voters and SMER voters, and (2) identifying differences and similarities in how clero-fascist and socialist authoritarian nostalgia predict voting for Slovak PRR parties.