Publication details
Money for our people, not for migrants: Electoral geography of xenophobic and extreme right-wing political parties in the 2016 Czech regional elections
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Historical experience of fascist (1939-1945) and communist (1948–1989) rule, and the popular struggle against those totalitarian regimes, resulted, in Czech Republic, in society where racist and extreme right-wing movements had almost no tradition and no support before the 1990s. However, the rise of social and regional inequalities coupled with economic crises and most recently with the so called migration crisis led to the surge of popular support to xenophobic and extreme right movements even in the ethnically and racially very homogeneous Czech society. The objective of the paper is to identify social and spatial contexts where those xenophobic and extreme right movements have found support. The European migration crisis of 2015-2016 became a major topic of the Czech regional elections held in October 2016 even though the Czech Republic was largely bypassed by the refugees, with very few asylum applications submitted in Czech Republic. Several openly xenophobic and extreme right political parties or movements were established before the elections, and together they received 8.4 per cent of electoral votes. Our analysis of the geography of electoral support to those parties has identified the spatial concentration of xenophobic and extreme right votes in the regions with Roma minorities, but also in peripheral, ethnically homogeneous regions which have been lagging behind in economic terms. Thus negative perception of local and regional economic development has created regions vulnerable to xenophobic propaganda irrespective of the concentration of ethnic or racial minorities or routes of international migration. |