The dog-whistle messaging of Repubilka’s leaders leaves observers in no doubt about their true identity: “We will put things in order”, says one of the billboards. (source: Sme - Marko Erd)
Welcome to your weekly commentary and overview of news from Slovakia. Expect the far right to make significant gains in the upcoming election. Viktor Orbán did it again. And how people in what is today Slovakia viewed elections in the past.
If you have a suggestion on how to make this overview better, let me know at michaela.terenzani@spectator.sk.
Slovak voters are unlikely to mimic the recent Spanish election scenario
All journalists covering Slovakia from abroad were familiar with the name of Marian Kotleba and his party. In 2016, his People’s Party - Our Slovakia (ĽSNS) party sent shockwaves around society when it made it into parliament with more than 8 percent of the vote. By then, Kotleba was already halfway through his term as regional governor of Banská Bystrica, after an earlier shock election result won him that position in 2013.
The heyday of ĽSNS seems to have passed (polls show it is likely to gain less than 2 percent in the September election), but that does not mean the Slovak parliament will be free of the far right after the vote. Kotleba himself is currently barred from running in the election after he was convicted on extremism charges last year, and most other high-profile figures deserted his party just a year into the current parliamentary term due to conflicts over funding, among other things. But these breakaways will carry his legacy forward under the brand of Republika, the party that they went on to found.
Other brands that are hoping to clear the electoral threshold and which, according to expert on extremism Tomáš Nociar, fall under the umbrella term ‘far right’ include the nativist Slovak National Party (SNS) and the populist Sme Rodina. The latter openly associates with foreign far-right counterparts such as Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini.
That neither the SNS nor Sme Rodina are necessarily perceived as far-right is a result of the normalisation and mainstreaming of the far right in the wake of ĽSNS’s election to parliament, Nociar notes.
