Minority Accommodation as a Trigger of Populist Politics in the Czech Republic and Slovakia: Populist Backlash?

Populists and radical right parties successfully mobilize electoral support by portraying establishment parties as ignoring grievances of the titular majority. Therefore, minority accommodation triggers a populist, anti-establishment backlash. We focus on minority accommodation in the Czech Republic and Slovakia and its impact on populist mobilization. We distinguish four types of minorities that generate resentment and we assess similarities and differences in the degree of their institutional accommodation: Roma, LGBT, immigrants and refugees and the Hungarian ethnic minority (in Slovakia only). Our aim is two-fold. First, we identify the determinants of institutional accommodation. Second, we analyse the effects of institutional mobilization and conditions under which it triggers of populist mobilization. Our analysis proceeds in two steps. First, we investigate the role of the EU conditionality on minority accommodation. In respect to ethnic minorities and the Roma, the EU was able to mitigate human rights violation and foster the adoption of anti-discrimination laws, but did not succeed in advancing institutional accommodation. The European Union played a limited in accommodation of social, non-ethnic minorities. Furthermore, the EU was successful in limiting segregation, but not in advancing co-optation of marginalized groups. Second, we look at the use of minority accommodations (or perceived accommodation, as some minorities remain marginalized, but are presented as favoured by the state) as a mobilization strategy of mainstream populists (Fico in Slovakia, Babis in the Czech Republic) and the radical right (Kotleba in Slovakia, Okamura in the Czech Republic) politicians. The discourse of ‘anti-discrimination as discrimination of the majority’ plays a central role in electoral mobilization of the radical right and (to a lesser degree) of the mainstream populists. However, the mainstream populists present the EU as enforcing a model of multicultural society antagonistic to the grievances of the titular majority and criticize the domestic political establishment as weak and incapable to defending the titular majority against the “Brussels dictate”.