On Saturday, Slovak voters will go to the polls in the first round of the country’s presidential election.
The event has understandably attracted little attention in the United States. Slovakia’s population is somewhere between 5 and 6 million, roughly that of Minnesota. Given Gaza, Ukraine, and rising tensions with China, a small central European country is far from the most pressing US foreign policy concern. And 2024 is a crowded year for elections: at least 64 countries, plus the European Union, are headed to the polls this year, including the United States.
But America’s own upcoming presidential election is the reason we should pay attention to Slovakia’s—and the domestic political context in which it is taking place. The Slovak presidency is largely ceremonial. But over the last year, the country’s president, Zuzana Čaputová, has helped block certain moves made by its prime minister, Robert Fico, who was returned to power in 2023 five years after resigning in disgrace. She’s refused, for example, to allow a climate change denier to be environment minister and helped stop certain changes to the criminal code reform by sending it to the country’s constitutional court. But she is not running again. Slovakia will soon have a new president, one who may be friendlier to Fico. To look at Slovak politics today is to see what happens when an emboldened aspiring autocrat returns to power, pushes out pro-Russian rhetoric, tries to win immunity for himself, and attacks the media, so that those who report on, say, corruption are seen as enemies of the people.
This could, of course, impact American foreign policy: if America’s European allies are not in lockstep on Ukraine, what does that mean for support for Ukraine in its war against Russia? But it is Slovakia’s domestic politics, inextricable from its foreign policy, where, an ocean away, Americans can find parallels to our own.
“As in many other western societies, we are deeply divided,” Miroslav Wlachovský, the country’s former minister for foreign affairs, told me over Zoom.
Slovakia has long been split between those who are more liberally minded and those with a more populist bent, a division that has become especially salient over the last decade.
In 2018, Robert Fico was forced to resign following months of anti-corruption protests — and weeks after the murder of 27-year-old investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancee, Martina Kušnírová. He was out after six consecutive years in power, replaced by Peter Pellegrini, who was widely seen as more moderate than Fico.
In 2019, Čaputová, a progressive, pro-European environmental activist, was elected president, promising to use the position to fight corruption. In 2020, her victory was followed by a new government in parliament. They, too, spoke of anti-corruption and the rule of law.
What’s more, it looked, for a moment, like people would be held accountable.........