Aidan McGarry is Lecturer in Politics at the School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton. Address: Mayield House, Falmer Campus, Brighton, bn1 9ph, UK. Email: a.mcgarry@brighton.ac.uk Ambiguous nationalism? Explaining the parliamentary under-representation of Roma in Hungary and Romania AIDAN MCGARRY his article explores why Roma are under-represented in the national assemblies of Central and Eastern European states, using Romani political parties in Hungary and Romania as case studies. Speciically, I ask whether the absence of a clearly deined conception of Roma nationalism at the national and transnational level accounts for the under-representation of Roma in the Hungarian and Romanian parliaments. his ambiguous nationalism stands in contrast to invocations of nationalism by other minorities in the region, notably the Turkish minority in Bulgaria and the Hungarian minority in Romania, whose electoral support is contiguous to their respective demo- graphic weights. Both of these minorities link nationalism to speciic cultural interests whereas the interests of Roma tend to relate to socio-economic and political factors. Whilst many factors conspire to impede the appropriate political representation of Roma across Central and Eastern Europe, this article seeks to shed light on the ot- neglected impact of Roma nationalism. Keywords: Roma, nationalism, party politics, Hungary, Romania, representation Introduction his article begins from the observation that Roma represent the most discrim- inated and disadvantaged minority group in Europe (European Commission 2004: 9–10; EUMC 2006: 5), and due to political, legal and social factors they continue to be marginalized. “Roma” is the name increasingly used by aca- demics, activists, and politicians to refer to a wide variety of communities predominantly occurring in Central and Eastern Europe that have adopted diferent groups and sub-groups over time (Guy 2001: xiv). Although these communities are diverse, they share a common experience in that their name typically evokes negative responses from the rest of society. Roma ‘who are oten visibly and culturally distinct from the other populations, are by far the most socially, politically, and economically disenfranchised of any ethnic group in the region’ (Stroschein 2002: 4). As Vermeersch (2001: 3) elaborates, ‘the introduction of the term “Roma” relects an attempt to break away from this social stigma and to produce a more positive image of themselves as a single ethnic group occurring in diferent countries’. All persons subsumed Romani Studies 5, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2009), 103–124 issn 1528–0748 (print) 1757–2274 (online) doi:10.3828/rs.2009.2