Re: "Greetings, Comrade", By Dewey Smolka, Vol. 8 No. 37, Sept 30 - Oct 6
The Slovak Communist Party has a whopping 11 seats out of 150! How, for goodness' sake, is that going to make one bit of difference to the ruling coalition? However you slice it, the best hope for the communists to have any voice at all is in being aligned (thus absorbed) into a now-deflated leftist opposition. And the only hope the communists have of even being heard within this lopsided spectrum is if there is dissent within the ruling coalition. This is actually possible. (Everything is possible in this political landscape.) However, given the quickness with which the ruling parties have found a united voice, I don't see party members having too much difficulty in finding a cohesive voice on essential EU matters (give or take some minor spats over cultural issues).
And let's face it. The current opposition doesn't have much respect for things overtly leftist anyway. In case you haven't noticed, being too far left is rather unpopular in Slovakia on the whole. The voters have spoken quite clearly on this. Now that they have, the "intelligence" you speak of is essentially mute, for lack of a better word.
Of course, intelligence per se is also an abstraction when it comes to politics. In the end, one can only measure intelligence based on the merit of and movement towards change. When one looks at the direction of things away from the tenets of communism (or perhaps the worse type of corruption), it is hard to afford the label of intelligence to those clearly on the way out.
Just a thought or two.
Phillip Sanchez
