A wolf without teeth: Electoral manifestos of populist radical right party SPD in Czech local elections

As the name suggests radical right parties are going to the edges of political spectre. It applies mostly for national level politics where such parties can hold strong anti-immigration, anti-elitist and even anti-democratic positions. However, such positions often do not have any meaning at local level because local government can hardly restrict the migration within country, the local elites are based on their communities what especially in environment with rather small municipalities diminishes the utility of anti-elite stances and local government cannot change rules of local politics. The nature of local politics is thus somehow hostile to presence of radical parties. In this paper, we investigate the ways in which radical right party SPD copes with local level in 2022 municipal elections. Using manual and automated coding of electoral manifestos from almost 100 municipalities we show that the in some municipalities party does not differ from other parties in regard of political stances indicated in manifesto while in some municipalities party makes claims unrelated to scope of local level to strengthen their radical appeal. Furthermore, we explore how are different strategies related to contextual characteristics of municipalities (size, centre/periphery, electoral support for SPD and experience with COVID-19 pandemic).