Authors

Discussion

"Why are those pensioners applauding this?", asks a political commentator when discussing the support of pensioners for a government candidate in the run-up to the Slovak 2024 parliamentary elections. The question joins a myriad of others over the past 30 years linked to the public questioning of political preferences of “the pensioners”, in particular women, ironically labelled as "democratic grannies" (babky demokratky) since the expression was launched in 1994 to mock the supporters of then Prime minister Vladimír Mečiar. This category can be seen as a local variant of a phenomenon that is observed in several post-socialist countries in relation to the elderly, such as the mocking of the Polish “babcie moherowe”. Yet little is known about the actual level of engagement of these women with the Prime minister Mečiar. The research on women who support conservative or nationalist parties in the region has often been limited to their role as voters. However, studies of conservative mobilisations in other cases, such as the United States and Italy, have demonstrated the value of exploring the relationship between women activists and their respective parties. 

This paper thus examines the phenomenon of "democratic grannies" in two dimensions: as a category of political discourse and, more importantly, as the actual practices of support for illiberal leaders by elderly women. This phenomenon is considered an understudied area of investigation into the contrasting appropriations of democracy in Slovakia after 1989. With regard to the latter, the paper focuses on the relationship between the ways in which elderly women made sense of their engagement and the mobilisation strategies of parties targeting them and framing their engagement. 

It builds on an analysis of the main media outlets for the first part (construction and uses of “democratic grannies” as a category in political discourse), and on an analysis of a corpus of 274 letters of women sent to the Slovak Prime minister from 1991 to 1997 for the second part. These letters represent one of the rare direct traces left of the political engagement of “ordinary citizens” expressing their support and opinions to Vladimír Mečiar.