Looking presidential

The imminence of a presidential election can mean only one thing: the season of cliché and dog-whistles is upon us.

HarabiňákHarabiňák (Source: TASR)

Since January, billboards bearing the confused messages and gurning faces of the numerous candidates have sprouted across the country. Their varying perspectives can be disorientating.

Zuzana Čaputová, we learn, is ‘My President’. Most-Híd leader Béla Bugár, the discount-store George Clooney of Slovak politics, is ‘Our President’. And Bohumila Tauchmannová is ‘the President of the Street’ – whatever that means.

SkryťTurn off ads
Article continues after video advertisement
SkryťTurn off ads
Article continues after video advertisement

Far-right candidate Marian Kotleba has resorted to far-right virtue-signalling: ‘Stop LGBT!’ and the bizarrely off-topic ‘Slovak Women are the Most Beautiful, We Don’t Need Foreign Women’. (Quite what he would do, as president, to halt this deadly scourge is not specified.)

SkryťTurn off ads

Not a million miles away, Mečiar-apologist Štefan Harabin is touring the country in the Harabiňák, a purple bus emblazoned with Slovak emblems and a close-up of Mr Harabin’s ornate facial hair. He promises a ‘Traditional and Legal State’: presumably a return to the halcyon days and wild privatisation of the 1990s. Mercifully, even as president, he would have little power to achieve this.

The rest of this article is premium content at Spectator.sk
Subscribe now for full access

I already have subscription - Sign in

Subscription provides you with:
  • Immediate access to all locked articles (premium content) on Spectator.sk
  • Special weekly news summary + an audio recording with a weekly news summary to listen to at your convenience (received on a weekly basis directly to your e-mail)
  • PDF version of the latest issue of our newspaper, The Slovak Spectator, emailed directly to you
  • Access to all premium content on Sme.sk and Korzar.sk

Top stories

Janka, a blogger, during the inauguration of the first flight to Athens with Aegean Airlines at the airport in Bratislava on September 14, 2023.

A Czech rail operator connects Prague and Ukraine, Dominika Cibulková endorses Pellegrini, and Bratislava events.


Píšem or pišám?

"Do ľava," (to the left) I yelled, "Nie, do prava" (no, to the right), I gasped. "Dolšie," I screamed. "Nie, nie, horšie..." My Slovak girlfriend collapsed in laughter. Was it something I said?


Matthew J. Reynolds
Czech biochemist Jan Konvalinka.

Jan Konvalinka was expecting a pandemic before Covid-19 came along.


SkryťClose ad