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The minority question has long been a hot topic in Central and Eastern Europe. Whereas most CEE countries guarantee the privileged position of the dominant nation, they also recognize the existence of national minorities and provide special rights for them. Hence there is an apparent contradiction between the values of the nation-states: unity and diversity. This article proposes that to resolve this contradiction, it is necessary to define the concept, scope and limitations of group-specific minority rights, as well as their relationship with other human rights and the nation-state. Constitutional courts are appropriate candidates for this task. However, based on our analysis of the relevant constitutional jurisprudence of five CEE countries – Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia – it seems that constitutional courts in the region have failed to properly conceptualize minority rights. Instead of developing appropriate tests for assessing the constitutionality of legal regulations, they have only superficially touched upon the conceptual issues of minority rights, using incidental, case-by-case arguments to justify the (un)constitutionality of the legal provisions. Therefore, this article also attempts to outline a constitutionality test that may be suitable for constitutional courts to consistently evaluate submissions that challenge the constitutionality of laws on minority rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a boom in the power of right-wing parties that are becoming government parties in Latin America and Europe. It has been pointed out that these are distinguished from traditional right-wing parties by their common ideology that transcends national contexts, which is why they have been grouped as New Right-wing parties. This article questions whether these parties share ideological themes or whether they are heterogeneous and obey national interests. This study systemizes the New Right-wing parties' programs and classifies them to answer the question. This corpus is then studied through frequency, network, and principal component analysis. Two conclusions are reached from this. First, these parties agree on issues such as provider States and nationalist claims, and, second, their programs have diverse themes that do not show the formation of an identifiable transnational ideological agenda in their programs. Consequently, grouping these parties as an ideologically homogeneous phenomenon can make invisible the fact that they are parties that adjust to particular demands of their political environment, in a logic that obeys more catch-all parties than ideological and dogmatic parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]