ABSTRACT

The article examines political strategies of the Slovak extreme right by drawing on theories of populism developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. It performs an analysis of the discourse of the far-right People’s Party Our Slovakia (ĽSNS). Its key finding is that ĽSNS discourse constructs an array of radical borders (frontiers) between the so-called ‘decent people’ and the multiple, but often unrelated, alleged threats, such as foreigners, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, the political establishment or the clandestine ‘global elites’. Multiple frontiers are woven together into an overarching conspiracy-minded narrative of the ‘system’ threatening the ‘people’, thus making the ĽSNS strategy an intrinsically populist one.