Excellent post today by Sean Hanley on the potential of the “new”(ish) Czech Party “Sovereignty” which perfectly corresponds to all that is interesting to me about the region’s politics these day: Sovereignty’s politics are straightforward:   a mix of Czech nationalism, euroscepticism and the anti-elite, outsider rhetoric that many people like to call populism. It [...]

Note: Thanks to The Monkey Cage for allowing me to reprint the posting below.  I’ve added several graphs that might help to clarify the narrative. One month after its June 12 elections, Slovakia has a new government. On Friday of last week Iveta Radicova of the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union became the prime minister [...]

January 2009 Poll Averages Overall Monthly Report Numbers for January are in and while there is not too much to report, there are a few striking findings.  Smer had an excellent month, tying its previous high score in UVVM and achieving a new high in FOCUS (by more than 2 percentage points over its previous [...]

The always unpredictable MVK has come in with new numbers for mid-December and so it is briefly worth revisiting the graphs.  The most interesting news from this survey, however, are the results for small parties that I do not cover here and will try to address in the next post. As we knew from the [...]

In a previous post I noted a growing gap between parties above the threshold of electability and those below, one that was unusual by Slovakia’s standards.  Thanks to the generosity of UVVM, FOCUS and IVO, which opened various archives to me during my time in Slovakia, I can now show a much longer time series [...]