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This article deals with one of the major political consequences of parliamentary elections in every parliamentary regime – the process of government formation. It focuses on the formation of the coalition government following the 2020 parliamentary elections in Slovakia, in the context of both pre-election developments as well as the main challenges and appeals of contemporary politics in general – the rise of far-right political parties. Its aim is to identify the coalition strategies presented before the elections of political parties and movements that had a theoretical chance of being elected to Parliament. Special emphasis is placed on the definition by the other political parties and movements of the long-time ruling party Smer and the far-right party Our Slovakia. The analysis continues with the post-election government formation process, the classification of the established coalition, including the allocation of cabinet portfolios, assessment of the similarities and differences of coalition parties, and factors that could possibly cause both instability as well as stability. It concludes that the joint definition by the new ruling parties and movements of Smer and Our Slovakia will, at least for some time, serve as a unifying factor keeping the coalition together. However, the coalition’s stability will be under almost constant pressure coming from both relations between coalition parties and the possibility of internal conflicts within the coalition parties and movements. The article argues that the establishment of the surplus majority coalition might – besides the official justification for it – serve as a protection against government destabilization.

If we were to look for one concept that has come to the fore in recent decades and has seen its heyday in academic circles and discourses on the political situation, it would certainly be populism. With the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president in 2016 and the subsequent impact it had on the Republican Party, Brexit, and a rise in the numbers of anti-establishment leaders and political parties in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, this concept has moved from academia to public discourse. Populism seems to have become a central concept for anyone interested in politics. More than 55,000 academic works (monographs, journal articles) and millions of newspaper articles, blogs, and posts on social media (Boros et al. 2020) in the last decade only further support this claim.Even though populism received a breath of fresh air during and after the global economic crisis following 2007/08 and especially after the three shocking events in the three oldest democracies (the Brexit referendum, the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of populist parties and leaders), we must realize that populism is nothing new; it has accompanied democratic politics for a long time, and its activity and success have experienced ups and downs. Before the mid-1950s, the term was associated with two phenomena: the Russian Narodniks, who assumed that revolution comes from the people, and the rural politics of the Populist Party in the U.S. Midwest (Deiwiks 2009;Gidron and Bonikowski 2014;Mendilow 2021). Despite promising starting points about the origins of populism, the definition of populism has changed, fragmented, and coalesced into a hodgepodge of different concepts throughout history, particularly due to the era and the political and social context in which populism manifested itself at the time (more in Mendilow 2021, pp. 6-9).Moreover, populism is difficult to define, even among academics (see Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017). The variety of definitions offered reflects the disciplines of scholars from political science, sociology, cultural studies, political psychology, communication and media studies, economics, and, more recently, business and leadership studies, as well as the attributes on which they focus (communication strategy, style, form of discourse, ideology, political strategy). The latter also explains why the content analysis of published scholarly articles has failed to classify the concept of populism into