The modern countries of the Visegrad Group – Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic – are consolidated and semi-consolidated democracies. Therefore, the phenomenon of a constructive parliamentary opposition, as practice shows, is peculiar for them. However, the role and functions of parliamentary opposition in the region are not only legally protected, but also largely foreseen. Instead, it has been discovered that the parliamentary opposition in the countries of the region is usually regulated on the basis of ideas and principles of political culture, democratic tolerance and respects for legitimate political and socio-economic cleavages. It was also investigated that political and legal status and powers of opposition in the countries of the Visegrad Group are rather situational. They depend on several factors: stability (congruence) or instability (incongruence) of parliamentary opposition; stability or instability of governments and pro-governmental political parties; dimensional fractionalization and ideological polarization of party systems, legislatures, governmental and oppositional political parties. This testifies that the condition of the effective operation of the opposition in a democratic regime is that a parliament represents different ideologies and different political convictions that necessarily exist in society. But they cannot be arranged exclusively by legal instruments (legal regulation of the status of political opposition), since this requires a constant political consensus, the tolerance of the elite and counter-elite, that is the establishment of moral, political and legal responsibility for the conduct of actions and inactions.
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