Working with data
The webpage focuses on political parties and their perception of nationalism and national identity. Firstly, the webpage contains a profile of each party in a national context based on basic facts, well known officials, and their electoral gains in national and European elections. Secondly, it gives an analytical insight into parties’ perceptions of national identity and nationalism. The parties are categorised according to mentions of related to national identity issues in election manifestos. These issues cover minorities, national myths, European integration, national sovereignty, integration of immigrants and related categories.
Selected case studies show parties’ "real politics" and strategies using national identity to politicise certain policies, such as using national mythologies in election campaigns. Case studies focus on up to three specific national identity issues for each country. They cover opposite positions of different parties to show different strategies and policies used to attract voters. For this purpose, visual (e.g. billboards) and text (e.g. given speeches) material was analyzed.
Acknowlegment
The Visegrad parties' profiles from 2006 - 2010 are based on a scholarly study published at Masaryk University: Černoch Filip, Husák Jan, Schütz Ondrej, Vít Michal (2011): Political parties and nationalism in Visegrad countries. Brno: Masarykova univerzita, Mezinárodní politologický ústav, Monography servies 46, 2011; and on the scholarly paper Husák Jan, Schütz Ondrej, Vít Michal (2012): National identity of the Political parties in Visegrad region and their European dimension, Journal on European Integration and Federalism, Science Po, Nice.
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Civic Democratic Party, (Občanská demokratická strana, ODS)
Civic Democratic Party was the dominant conservative formation in the Czech Republic. The beginning of its political activity is dated in the early 1990s due to fragmentation of OF. Václav Klaus led the conservative stream inside the OF. During the time early after election in 1990 Václav Klaus was elected as the chairman of OF and he started creating new party based on conservative neoliberal ideas. ODS was the most successful political party in elections in 1991, 1992 and in 1996, and Václav Klaus became the prime minister for three times.
Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska, PO)
The Civic Platform (PO) calls itself a liberal conservative Christian democratic political party, and is a member of the European People’s Party in the European Parliament (Poland EPP 2011).
Communist party of Bohemia and Moravia (Komunistická strana Čech a Moravy, KSČM)
Since the regime changed to democracy there has been an unwritten agreement between other political parties in the Czech Republic about excluding KSČM from high level policy-decision processes; however in the real political life there are many contacts and KSČM has already become a legitimate part of the political system in the Czech Republic. Moreover, in the last decade Social democratic party in particular has relied on silent support from KSČM on some decisions against right wing political solutions or to support some leftist decisions which could not get support from other mostly centrist or right parliamentary parties.
Christian and Democratic Union – Czechoslovak People´s Party ( Křesťanská a demokratická unie – Československá strana lidová, KDU-ČSL)
KDU-ČSL originally represented Christianity and Christian and traditional conservative values as stated above, but since 1990s it has profiled itself as a non-confessional party for all people even
Freedom and Solidarity (Sloboda a Spravodlist, SaS)
Political party Freedom and Solidarity is relatively new in the Slovak party system. Party was founded by economist Richard Sulík and some other entrepreneurs and economists generally from Bratislava. Sulík served as an advisor under two ministers of finances from both right wing government of Mikuláš Dzurinda and center left government of Róbert Fico. Sulík was main designer of the pension system reform and therefore in some way active in politics before founding SaS. New party was established in 2009 soon enough to take part in the European Elections of the same year. SaS gained almost five percent of the votes. Despite it was not enough to enter the European Parliament many including Sulík considered these results to be fairly good. Before the general elections of 2010 SaS persistently criticized Fico’s government and refused to enter any potential coalition with the Direction – SD. In the elections SaS managed to enter parliament and even to become the third largest party with more that twelve percent of the popular vote. SaS also entered newly formed government led by Iveta Radičová from SDKÚ – DS.