Centrist Populists and Roma Minority: An Unexpected Alliance in Slovakia?

In Slovakia, the Roma constitute the second largest ethnic minority, comprising around 9–10 % of the population. Traditionally, they have been perceived as politically inactive in the region, compared to, for example, the ethnic Hungarians. For more than two decades after the establishment of the post-communist republic, the Slovak Roma lacked significant political representation at the national level (Vašečka, 2006), with ethnically-based initiatives being limited to individual candidates campaigning at the regional level in Roma-dominated constituencies. Furthermore, both established and fringe parties in Slovakia have run anti-Roma campaigns and excluded the Roma from their parties. The anti-establishment, centrist populist movement Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OĽaNO) broke this trend when it was founded in late 2011, as it recruited Roma to its electoral lists, allowing this group to gain representation in parliament for the first time. Given the tendency throughout the world for non-leftist populist parties to rally against immigrants and ethnic minorities, the decision of OĽaNO to actively recruit Roma candidates is surprising. Among populist parties, normally only leftwing ones support political inclusion (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2012), but in Slovakia, the leftwing populist Smer actually has run excluding, anti-Roma campaigns. How can we explain the decision of a centrist-populist party to support an inclusionist agenda? We argue that in the Slovak case, the absence of ‘inclusive’ appeals towards the Roma in the language of the Slovak left provides an opening in the political opportunity structures for other, ‘non-leftist’ actors to partly adopt this ‘inclusive’ agenda. Consequently, OĽaNO took advantage of this opening to declare itself as a party that champions the interest of Slovak Romas. How then does the movement’s pro-Roma sentiment get reflected in its public communication? Utilizing a rather specific type of discourse analysis on a data sample consisting of both primary (social media posts, transcripts of press conferences) and secondary sources (newspaper articles, web pages), we aim to show that the absence of ethnically based, pro-Roma mobilization among the Slovak left may have created a fertile environment (‘an opening of the political opportunity structures’) for the utilization of openly pro-Roma appeals in the political communication of the center populist OĽaNO. Our analysis covers a time frame of the last four parliamentary elections in Slovakia (2012, 2016, 2020, 2023), each being marked by the success of Roma candidates on OĽaNO’s electoral list. We further argue that the explicitly anti-establishment profile of OĽaNO allows its representatives to opportunistically ‘include’ Slovak Roma as a segment of the ‘ordinary people’, whose interest the movement claims to safeguard against the unresponsive establishment. References Mudde, C., & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2013). Exclusionary vs. Inclusionary Populism: Comparing Contemporary Europe and Latin America. Government and Opposition, 48(2), 147-174. doi:10.1017/gov.2012.11 Vašečka, M. (2006). Political participation of Roma in Slovakia and Prospects for their Integration. In E. Rindzevičiūtė (Ed.), Re-approaching East-Central Europe: Old Region, New Institutions? (pp. 127-150).Center for Baltic East European Studies.