Slovak Elections and Politics | Fico the Fourth 🇸🇰

[Antonio the Sixth]

Really bizarre for a country like Slovakia not to have an established mechanism for early elections. Hopefully the next government can make a permanent fix, because I'm sure political instability isn't going anywhere.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I still don't understand what Pellegrini was expecting going with Fico. Obviously a cutthroat politician like Fico wasn't just going to forgive or forget, and Hlas loses its whole raison d'être as a party if it backs the party it was rebelling against. He was such a promising figure but I guess he just wasn't cut out for Slovak politics.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Really disappointing. I hate that in Slovakia you basically have to choose between pro-democracy neoliberals and Putin-friendly socdems, and I was really hoping Pellegrini would be the best of both worlds, but turns out he just won't stand for anything. I didn't want to support Korčok but I guess I have no choice.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Fico's endorsement of Pellegrini: a four-minute video, three minutes of which are spent criticizing the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia and talking about how "Mr. Dzurinda stands by Mr. Korčok and controls to what extent he is willing to serve foreign interests" and "they were willing to enter NATO even at the cost of burning down Slavic unity". The Pelle endorsement itself is phrased in a very strange way: most of the remaining time is spent attacking Korčok as a warmonger who will "support everything that the West orders him to do without hesitation", and Pellegrini is mentioned only as a moderate who "we should support whether we like him or not" because Smer doesn't have a presidential candidate of its own.

Makes Chirac's "personal" endorsement of VGE in 1981 feel like the pinnacle of loyalty by comparison.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Huh. It wasn't even that close in the end. I guess this is a reality check against momentum and vibes vs cold hard math when it comes to predicting elections. The "fundamentals" were clearly favoring Pellegrini even if he ran a seemingly abysmal campaign.

I guess I don't care much about the outcome after all. Korčok would have been better on the international stage, but in the end it's Fico pulling the strings either way. And neither he nor Pellegrini can afford to rock the boat too much.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Is there a particular reason for the massive surge in turnout? Have Slovak politics polarized a lot following the political crises of the 2020s, or is there something specific to the candidates that drew people to the polls?

[Antonio the Sixth]

Is there a particular reason for the massive surge in turnout? Have Slovak politics polarized a lot following the political crises of the 2020s, or is there something specific to the candidates that drew people to the polls?

It's polarization. The Kuciak murder boosted opposition turnout and demotivated Smer voters in 2019, especially in the runoff. Same thing happened in 2020. Then Matovič's incompetence and Heger's support for Ukraine boosted Smer and far-right turnout in 2023 and again yesterday. On the map, many of the highest increases in turnout were in areas where Smer, Harabin and Kotleba were the strongest, now and five years ago (let's put it this way, Hlas ministers parading around with Hitler-saluting neo-Nazis didn't exactly hurt Pelle with ĽSNS voters). Pellegrini's belated but all the more enthusiastic pro-Russian and anti-LGBT turn was a masterstroke: it got him voters who wouldn't otherwise care about the election, but saw the need to protect Slovakia from Ukrainian Nazis, NATO warmongers, gender propaganda or whatever. Hungarian turnout also increased (Orbán's state TV openly campaigning for Pelle in the last days couldn't have hurt) and Hungarians now vote just like Slovaks in areas with comparable economic situation and urbanization. It's why I chose to compare this election not to last time, but to 2009, when a Fico-adjacent candidate won by a similar margin and with a vaguely similar, yet in some ways very different map.

There's certainly something weird about Slovak and Hungarian nationalists getting along... But I guess that goes to show how surface-level the "nationalism" actually is. At the end of the day, for both Orban and Fico, it's all about consolidating power, and it's always easier to deal with a fellow autocrat as a neighbor than with someone who can be held accountable by their citizenry.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Unintended consequence of the Pan-European Security Umbrella. Irredentism is rendered as truly and genuinely performative, and so all kinds of associations that were once unthinkable for very basic practical reasons are not.

I was actually just thinking that. In a way, there's no greater triumph for the EU than to force even its fiercest opponents to think in its own terms.