Slovak Elections and Politics | Fico the Fourth 🇸🇰

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

It seems very fitting that the only referendum in Slovakia's history to not have failed due to insufficient turnout was the 2003 one on joining the EU. Even it could only muster 52.12% turnout, surprisingly close to the 50% referendum validity threshold.

"It remains the only referendum in the country's history to have not failed due to insufficient voter turnout."
Incredible country.

[Estrella]

You noticed that thread on IGD about why no-one talks about Vietnam's human rights abuses?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trịnh_Xuân_Thanh

On July 23, 2017, TC2 allegedly kidnapped Trịnh Xuân Thanh in Berlin. He and his companion were kidnapped in the Tiergarten area. A rescue vehicle with Czech license plates was involved in the incident.[5] Witnesses reported that they only realized it was a kidnapping when they heard his companion screaming.[6] From Germany, Trinh Xuan Thanh was transferred to Prague and from Prague to Bratislava. In his memoires, Slovak ex-president Andrej Kiska mentions that few days after the kidnapping incident, one of Kiska's bodyguards told him that a Vietnamese citizen had been kidnapped from Slovakia and that then Interior Minister Robert Kaliňák was behind it. The bodyguard learned this from his colleagues. One of them is said to have flown with the abducted Vietnamese to Moscow. [7] In 2019, Slovakian police critic Ivan Matušík found an invoice for 17,000 euros from the Slovak Ministry of Interior to the Vietnamese Ministry of Interior for flight costs to Moscow dated July 26, 2017.[8]

This case has been popping up from time to time for the past seven years. The National Criminal Agency has now indicted eight people in the case, including agents of Vietnamese intelligence service, a former advisor to Robert Fico (now a citizen of Nigeria) and Tô Lâm, the man who was Vietnam's Minister of Public Security at the time and now happens to be the newly elected President

_{(There's actually a not insignificant Vietnamese minority in Slovakia, about 0.2% of population. Last year they were recognized as an official minority and gained representation on various ethnic/culture-related quangos. There's even more of them in Czechia, almost 1%.)}


And more censorship news, a continuation of this:

They do put pressure on opposition media and government politicians started boycotting political talkshows on “unfriendly” channels, but it’s just one part of the strategy. [...] Private media is also eager to help Fico if it makes them money. The staff at TV Markíza formed a union a few weeks ago and threatened a strike after allegations of pressure from management to make the news less critical of the government.

After the political talkshows on JOJ and TA3 televisions were forced to end earlier this year due to a boycott by government politicians, the one on Markíza is the only major one left. In a truly incredible moment, Markíza's chief political journalist Michal Kovačič ended yesterday's broadcast of his talkshow by calling out not just the government but his own management for political pressure and censorship.

Slovakia is currently experiencing a struggle over the Orbánisation of our broadcasting, and the future of RTVS is being debated in public. However, this struggle is actually taking place everywhere. But it is happening quietly and stealthily. If we do not stop it, it will have devastating consequences for Slovak democracy. We face pressures not only from politicians but also from our own leadership. Thanks to the fact that our editorial staff did not get scared, got together and faced them together, today our programming has a completely different shape from what our leadership is pushing for.

[Estrella]

Na telo, the TV Markíza political talkshow mentioned above, was cancelled the next day after the presenter’s criticism of political pressure. Markíza employees’ union announced they’re ready for a strike and gave the management an ultimatum to bring Na telo back. Management responded by placing private security all around the building, in case the employees attempted to take over the programming. They also called Kovačič’s actions “intolerable” and “unjustifiable”.

This in fact not the first time Markíza’s employees rose up against a takeover by supporters of an increasingly autocratic government:

Pavol Rusko is (was?) one of the richest people in Slovakia. His first involvement in politics was as the director of TV Markíza, the only private TV station in Slovakia during the vaguely authoritarian Vladimír Mečiar era. Markíza's fairly balanced news coverage was a huge contrast to blatant propaganda on the public STV and made the station very popular. Two weeks before the 1998 election, Rusko's long-running dispute with shareholder Marián Kočner finally boiled over. Kočner sent people from the "Borbély Detective Agency" (a front for Bratislava's most prominent mafia family) to seize the Markíza building. Due to Kočner's close relations with Mečiar, this was seen as an attempt to silence opposition media and was met with a massive backlash. Newsreaders barricaded themselves in the studio, thousands of people surrounded the building and after a wave of protests spread through the country, supported by all of the opposition, Mečiar pressured Kočner to call it off.

And guess who was one of the leaders of those protests?

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Estrella, with the way things are going, how would you contrast Meciar and Fico, and what's your preference between them?

[Estrella]

Estrella, with the way things are going, how would you contrast Meciar and Fico, and what's your preference between them?

Mečiar went much, much further – Fico is not yet in the stage of using intelligence services to sabotage the opposition, he didn't kidnap Čaputová's son and didn't have anybody murdered so far either – but the reason for that was that he was absurdly incompetent at the more low-key pressure and censorship that comes with the kind of Orbánist illiberal democracy that Fico is implementing right now.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Estrella, with the way things are going, how would you contrast Meciar and Fico, and what's your preference between them?

Mečiar went much, much further – Fico is not yet in the stage of using intelligence services to sabotage the opposition, he didn't kidnap Čaputová's son and didn't have anybody murdered so far either – but the reason for that was that he was absurdly incompetent at the more low-key pressure and censorship that comes with the kind of Orbánist illiberal democracy that Fico is implementing right now.

It does seem to me that Fico is a much more capable and competent politician, not to mention far more savvy. Would that be an accurate assessment?

[Estrella]

Estrella, with the way things are going, how would you contrast Meciar and Fico, and what's your preference between them?

Mečiar went much, much further – Fico is not yet in the stage of using intelligence services to sabotage the opposition, he didn't kidnap Čaputová's son and didn't have anybody murdered so far either – but the reason for that was that he was absurdly incompetent at the more low-key pressure and censorship that comes with the kind of Orbánist illiberal democracy that Fico is implementing right now.

It does seem to me that Fico is a much more capable and competent politician, not to mention far more savvy. Would that be an accurate assessment?

Definitely. Mečiar was a thug who got as far as he did thanks to his arrogance and a great deal of luck. Fico is, as Pellegrini called him once, a "cold-blooded technologist of power".

[Estrella]

Mečiar was a thug who got as far as he did thanks to his arrogance and a great deal of luck.

Just an illustration of what I mean by this. At the time of the Revolution, Mečiar was a complete nobody. He worked as a legal advisor at a glass bottle factory and only ended up in politics by chance. The first democratic government couldn't agree on who to appoint as the Slovak provincial Minister of Interior (responsible for public security and intelligence services, so a very sensitive role at a time of political turmoil). Mečiar was friends with one of the people from Alexander Dubček's newly founded social democratic faction and got him to convince the PM to appoint him to the position as the faction's nominee in January 1990.

His popularity rose dramatically when he gained a reputation for no-nonsense decisive action. In March 1990, President Václav Havel issued an amnesty for all political prisoners and many non-violent criminals. The inmates of Leopoldov prison, incensed by being left out despite many being sentenced for serious crimes and murder, started a protest that lasted for two weeks and escalated into a violent riot. The prisoners barricaded themselves in the building, made improvised weapons first using bricks from dismantled chimneys, then machetes out of kitchen knives and even rigged propane tanks to use as bombs. 150 prisoners who refused to join were taken hostage, locked in a hall and threatened with being burned alive. Barricades were built all over the prison complex, multiple buildings were set on fire and the siege dragged on for eight days.

As the responsible minister, Vladimír Mečiar came up with a simple, effective and overwhelmingly popular solution: send in the tanks.

Bukele would be proud.

[Estrella]

Since we're on the topic of the Wild West that this country was in the 1990s, there's a freshly released game called Vivat Slovakia. It's basically GTA set in 90s Bratislava, with all the arrogant nouveaux riches, bank robberies, intelligence service dirty work, mafia hit jobs and car bombs that were so typical for those times.

The best part? Vivat Slovakia is named after the one thing from the 90s that everyone – and I mean everyone – remembers, besides the scandals and bombings and assassinations: Mečiar's 1994 campaign song.

[Estrella]

Pellegrini is assuming office in two weeks, and so Hlas chose its new leader today.

Minister of Interior: Matúš Šutaj Eštok (Hlas)
Pellegrini's right hand and attack dog, more Smer-y than the rest of Hlas, called PS "an extremist party that people should protect their wallets from", wants to fire the special anti-corruption prosecutor, called anti-corruption investigators "cowboys who bend justice", "a bunch of scumbags" and "the true mafia", says "we don't live in a democracy but in a police state"... yeah.

I think we can now stop pretending Hlas is somehow less reactionary or less authoritarian than Smer.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Really makes you wonder what's the point of Hlas anymore. How likely is it to re-merge with Smer before the next elections?

[Estrella]

Really makes you wonder what's the point of Hlas anymore. How likely is it to re-merge with Smer before the next elections?

Not very likely IMO, and most analysts think so too. Eštok will alienate many voters, but he still has a chance to keep the few percent who basically agree with Smer's policies but see Fico as a criminal. There's also (allegedly) some bad blood between the two parties' cadres, especially in local government. I could only see Hlas merging into Smer if it turns out that there's so few of those voters that Hlas would have trouble crossing the threshold in 2027.