DEFINING RESPONSES TO RISE OF EXTREMISM IN EUROPE
Tailor-Made Recommendations for Mainstream Parties in Central Europe
Who we are?
The coordinator of this project is the European Values Think-Tank, a Prague-based non-partisan public policy institute, together with the League of Human Rights, advocacy NGO based in Brno. The main donor of the project is the Open Society Foundations (Think Tank Fund).
The Problem
In recent years, we have witnessed a rise in influence of the extremist and populist parties and their leaders in Europe. The extremists gain media and political space from the fact that mainstream political parties ignore immigration and minorities-integration agenda. The lack of sufficient political communication is the main reason why populists and extremists dominate the public debate about these issues and why they are even often perceived by the voters as more competent to solve the related problems.
What do we want to do with it?
As a result of the first part of our project, we have recently published a comprehensive monograph POLITICS AND POLICIES OF INTEGRATION IN AUSTRIA, HUNGARY, CZECHIA, DENMARK AND AT THE EU LEVEL. Politicians and party experts from centre-right and centre-left parties in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria and Poland will be separately provided with trainings and very practical tailor-made recommendations on how to communicate the sensitive issues of integration of immigrants and minorities to the public in order to marginalize chances of the extremist parties to control this issues agenda.
When?
Five National Seminars
Public discussions, expert roundtable and closed meetings in five Central European capitals aim to get national experts involved in further specification of recommendation created during the first part of the project.
Two Regional Seminars
Outcomes of the national seminars will be used for preparation of materials for workshops/trainings performed during the regional seminars.
Which parties will be addressed?
Without concrete improvements and results stemming from practical day-to-day policies, we cannot expect long term trust in the society and successful integration on a broader scale. We again focus on genuine measures that could be ideally employed by politicians of both side of the mainstream. We are aware that it is not possible to provide useful recommendations for centre-left and centre-right parties together; therefore we have decided to split political subjects according to their political profiling.
The 400-paged study is HERE available for download.
