Slovak Elections and Politics: presidential runoff on 6 April 🇸🇰

[CumbrianLefty]

Given the government has a supermajority, have they announced any sort of constitutional changes they want to make?

They haven't mentioned anything, and there isn't talk of any problems that could be solved by changing the constitution. Of course, they might come up with something once this crisis is over.

What sort of changes might be possible?

[Estrella]

Given the government has a supermajority, have they announced any sort of constitutional changes they want to make?

They haven't mentioned anything, and there isn't talk of any problems that could be solved by changing the constitution. Of course, they might come up with something once this crisis is over.

What sort of changes might be possible?

So, I actually looked into it in more detail, and they seem to have one thing that is fairly important to them and requires changing the constitution, after all: compulsory background checks for judges to investigate connections to organized crime. They also want to lower the turnout threshold for referenda to be valid from 50% to 25%, but that's more of an afterthought.

[Estrella]

A month and a half into the new cabinet's term, things are looking pretty good IMO. They're handling corona very well (strict restrictions thanks to which there have been 0-1 new cases for the past few days) and, together with the president, they issued a declaration confirming Slovakia's orientation towards the West, NATO and EU.

Smer, on the other hand, is in turmoil. The party is governed by a weird duumvirate of Pellegrini (main face of their campaign) and Fico (still the official party leader). Now, Pellegrini wants to call a leadership election to depose Fico. This makes sense - I've seen a poll (which I can't find now) that says that Čaputová and Pellegrini are tied for the most trusted political figure, ahead of Matovič. The membership, however, are mostly Fico loyalists, which has led to musings that Pellegrini might create his own party.

Maybe even ousting Fico wouldn't be enough to detoxify the party, though, as today yet more information surfaced about the jailed mafiosi Kočner and Vadala: they were apparently trying to use their very good friend Mária Trošková to gain influence in the Cabinet Office to protect their, er, "business ventures" - for example, putting a certain person in charge of one customs office to help Vadala smuggle goods from Ukraine. She also acted as a connection between Vadala and the then-secretary of State Security Council, Viliam Jasaň. The relations between her and Vadala weren't always smooth - they were lovers, and she was upset that he didn't tell her he was married.

All of that is more than enough for a pretty big scandal, but there's a catch: Trošková was Fico's personal assistant when he was PM. Even worse, she was, and probably still is, actually his mistress (and yes, he's still married).

[Estrella]

When I wrote about the turmoil in Smer, what I expected was that, over the next couple of months, there would be some arguments but nobody would actually dare to do anything to rock the boat. After all, Fico is Smer and Smer is Fico - the man has led the party for twenty years without so much as a peep from his people. Turns out I was wrong.

Today, Pellegrini and several ex-ministers held a press conference where they went straight for the jugular: Pellegrini accused Fico of "destroying" the party and asked him to resign, saying that is the only chance the party has to stay relevant. So, what now?

Fico clearly can't avoid an internal election. That doesn't mean he's doomed - he could imitate Vladimír Mečiar and Mikuláš Dzurinda and salvage his leadership at the last minute by rigging the delegate selection. If, however, he wins, Pellegrini and his people are basically certain to leave the party, along with many voters.

[PSOL]

May an actually good force of the left rise from the ashes of Smer.

What is PS and SPOLU doing? What about the president?

[Estrella]

https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1267084865272504323

Good news for Pellegrini - there are plenty of voters like my grandmother (she likes Pelle but hates Fico so much she wouldn't touch Smer with a ten-foot pole).

Also, lol SNS - Slovakia's oldest party (founded in 1871, current iteration in 1990) doesn't even register (okay, it technically does, I first saw this poll in a newspaper where they got 0.9%). Even more hilariously, this time four years ago they were polling at like 15%.

Europe Elects also published an article to go with the poll. Just one thing I'd add to it - I wouldn't overstate how socially moderate or even liberal Pelle's people are, because ultimately they're probably looking to recreate what Smer was to the old HZDS - a detoxified, more liberal (as opposed to authoritarian) version of a party for rural, older people. I'm not saying that it's certain that's how it's gonna turn out, but I can't think of any different strategy. Liberal urban middle class is alergic to Smer and I can't see them voting for their ex-PM...

May an actually good force of the left rise from the ashes of Smer.

What is PS and SPOLU doing? What about the president?

...which is why I'm not as hopeful as you, PSOL, at least if by 'good' you mean 'like in the West'.

Anyway, the president is doing great. She is the country's most popular political figure but she's generally staying in the backstage (as presidents usually do). As for PS-Spolu... I haven't heard anything substantial from them since the election ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[PSOL]

I meant good in the context of Slovakia having a left wing party that isn’t corrupt or borderline reactionary.

[Estrella]

I meant good in the context of Slovakia having a left wing party that isn’t corrupt or borderline reactionary.

In that case, as skeptical as I am of the new party, they're going to be incomparably better than Smer. I don't wanna be too optimistic, but it's not just about Pellegrini having a different mentality - the society also changed. Corruption and borderline reactionarism are still widespread across most parties, but it's not as blatant as it used to be and there's actual opposition against it.

[Former President tack50]

Social Democratic and left wing parties in general being rather socially conservative and corrupt seems to be a trend all across Eastern Europe tbh.

Not an unbreakable one mind you (Poland's left seems to be pretty good for instance even if its election results are not great) but certainly a trend nontheless.

I assume this is a holdover from communism and that said left wing parties are the parties for nostalgics and apologists of the old regime?

[Estrella]

Social Democratic and left wing parties in general being rather socially conservative and corrupt seems to be a trend all across Eastern Europe tbh.

Not an unbreakable one mind you (Poland's left seems to be pretty good for instance even if its election results are not great) but certainly a trend nontheless.

I assume this is a holdover from communism and that said left wing parties are the parties for nostalgics and apologists of the old regime?

⚠️ unexpected effortpost, not exhaustive but exhausting to write. wtf am i doing with my life

Uh, so this is really complicated, but I'll try to go country by country:

So, Slovakia (Smer), Romania (PSD), Bulgaria (BSP), Russia (KPRF)  and Kazakhstan* (QKHP) have these conservative nationalist left-wing parties, more-or-less directly descended from the ruling communist party. It's mostly for the reasons you described (although, outside Russia, 'apologists' might be going a bit too far, nobody cares about what happened during communism). They have a mostly rural, poorer, older electorate and do horribly in cities and with youth (we had a mock election in my school and Smer got iirc like 4% lol).

Czechia has two major left parties - the old style communist KSČM (obiously very conservative) and ČSSD (all over the place, with many conservatives like Miloš Zeman, also very anti-communist until recently).

Poland is something different. It's actually very similar to Turkey, in a way. The country is split - the east is poorer, more religious and more nationalist, while the west is richer, less religious and less nationalist, possibly because the people are transplants who moved there after ethnic cleansing, so less 'stick in a mud'-y. Which is how the left ended up with more liberal voters... _{I guess? Polish posters please don't kill me if I got this wrong}

Hungary is... weird. MSZP is the a reasonably liberal party, but, back when they weren't a joke, they got a lot of votes from poor, post-industrial areas. Anyway, then they f***** up, not a little but a lot, and ended up as a Budapest-only party, so I at least understand that part.
 
Ex-Yugoslavia is even more complicated because political loyalties are often determined by your experience during the war. Slovenia has a very 'Western' left (SD, Levica and a left-liberal party that gets everyone excited only to get into government and crash and burn four years later, rinse and repeat - currently LMŠ), although there's apparently something about WW2, četniks and partisans that has an impact on the left-right divide, but I don't pretend to understand that. Croatia is similar, to a lesser extent - the divide is basically nationalist vs. not, the right does best in areas that were occupied and left in places that were away from the front, so that's probably what makes the left more liberal, though, you know, chicken/egg etc. Serbia has both kinds of left: the conservative SPS (the party of Slobodan Milošević, which explains it) and liberal DS and SDS. Kosovo is kind of weird - they have Vetëvendosje, a nationalist (KFOR GTFO) but apparently pretty socially progressive party. Montenegro's DPS is a party of power that doesn't bother with such petty things as ideology, which most likely means they're conservative. North Macedonia has a more-or-less two party system, one half of which is SDSM, which is at least not nationalist (they signed the Prespa agreement about renaming the country).

My knowledge of the Baltics is pretty fuzzy, but Estonia has Social Democrats who are sorta liberal but centre-leftish at best. Latvia has no ethnically Latvian left (except for the irrelavant Progresīvie), and the main left-wing party is Saskaņa, which is probably a front for United Russia. Lithuania has Social Democrats, Labour Party and Social Democratic Labour Party, but I have no idea where they stand.

And then there's Moldova, which has the conservative PSRM. There's a divide between people who identify as Romanian, Moldovan and Russian, and PSRM does well with the latter two. Until 2014 or so, the main left-wing party in the country was Party of Communists of Republic of Moldova, whose Wikipedia article contains this amazing line:

While officially espousing a Leninist communist doctrine, there is debate over their policies. The Economist considers it a centre-right party, communist only in name...

_{* I'm on thin ice here, but it does technically count as (very) Eastern Europe}

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

Poland is something different. It's actually very similar to Turkey, in a way. The country is split - the east is poorer, more religious and more nationalist, while the west is richer, less religious and less nationalist, possibly because the people are transplants who moved there after ethnic cleansing, so less 'stick in a mud'-y. Which is how the left ended up with more liberal voters... _{I guess? Polish posters please don't kill me if I got this wrong}

The Poland A/B divide has only moderate relevance to the electoral patterns of the left (prior to 2015, anyway). The SLD's voter coalition before that is best understood as 1) a coalition of the more provincial parts of the west, 2) those parts of the east which were more inclined towards the left during the Second Republic, and 3) those western cities which underwent more resettlement.

That pattern changed in 2015 as ZL made Barbara Nowacka its face and correspondingly shed some votes in 1) and 2) and gained some in 3), but this was distorted by the existence of Razem and .N. In 2019, this pattern was turbocharged. Mortality almost certainly played a large part in this as well, but obviously that's impossible to quantify.

Czechia has two major left parties - the old style communist KSČM (obiously very conservative) and ČSSD (all over the place, with many conservatives like Miloš Zeman, also very anti-communist until recently).

The ČSSD's divisions, I think, are best understood as a divide between those who want the party to be more like Smer and those who would prefer it to be a grey blob of nothing.

Slovenia has a very 'Western' left (SD, Levica and a left-liberal party that gets everyone excited only to get into government and crash and burn four years later, rinse and repeat - currently LMŠ), although there's apparently something about WW2, četniks and partisans that has an impact on the left-right divide, but I don't pretend to understand that.

Mostly the Slovenian centre-left never got over Janez Drnovšek's retirement and death and desperately wants to find a successor to rally around.

Estonia has Social Democrats who are sorta liberal but centre-leftish at best

The Estonian Social Democrats are an odd beast, the appeal seems to be that they look '''''modern''''' and '''''Western''''' rather than anything else.

Latvia has no ethnically Latvian left (except for the irrelavant Progresīvie), and the main left-wing party is Saskaņa, which is probably a front for United Russia.

'Front for United Russia' is overstating it, they are the ethnic Russian party and have had ties to United Russia as a consequence of that but have, AFAIK, been gradually cutting those in their quest to finally get into a government. (lol)

Lithuania has Social Democrats, Labour Party and Social Democratic Labour Party, but I have no idea where they stand.

The Social Democrats are a merger of a post-communist party and a minor emigré outfit and have historically been very light on policy, but those elements which wanted them to be an ideological centre-left party seem to have won out. The SDLP is a splinter party of those Social Democrats who disliked that shift. The Labour Party is an oligarch's plaything and stands for vague populist bullsh!t.

[Astatine]

Peter Pellegrini confirmed today he would leave Smer and found and own party.

[Estrella]

Peter Pellegrini confirmed today he would leave Smer and found and own party.

Yep, it's on. Pelle's Anti Social Democrat Social Club is a thing now. 10 of Smer's 26 MPs announced that they're leaving the party, among them well-known and relatively popular figures such as ex-Ministers Denisa Saková (Interior), Peter Žiga (Economy) and Ľubica Laššáková (Culture), ex-Mayor of Slovakia's second largest city Richard Raši and press secretary Erik Tomáš.

The new party's name, logo (no green please, we've got four of those already), program and such stuff will likely be announced in the coming weeks.

As for Robert Fico's reaction, he posted a long passive-agressive Facebook rant, whose last sentence sums up what his strategy to combat Pelle's gang is going to be:

As the chairman of Smer-SD, I can proudly say that, since I've entered politics, I've been a convinced leftist and I'll never fall to slniečkárskym* and neoliberal trends.

* Roughly translated as "SJW", literally means something like "sunny-ist" - think Lil' Justin's Sunny Ways.

[Estrella]

A hilarious suicide by words from Fico: on a press conference about the breakup of his party, he, among other things, called the defectors "traitors", complained how ungrateful they are etc., and then said that the only reason Smer didn't get 12-13% of the vote (instead of 18% it got irl) was that he pushed to pass pension bonuses at the last minute before the election and Pellegrini has nothing to do with that electoral "success". Well...
1. Pelle got twice as much preference votes as Fico, so it's pretty clear who is more popular
2. Did he just admit to basically bribing the voters?

In the meantime, even loyalists who stayed in Smer are getting restless. In an interview, MEP Monika Beňová called out Fico for being secretive, making decisions on his own without consulting anyone, said that he's "paranoid", "only sees traitors and enemies everywhere and hides himself instead of facing the problems" and insinuated he's an alcoholic.

[CumbrianLefty]

Bit of a Gyurcsany vibe there methinks.

[Estrella]

1. Pelle continues to build his own Smer with blackjack and hookers by announcing the name and logo of the new party. Social democratic voters will now have a choice between Thomson and Thompson Direction - Social Democracy and Voice - Social Democracy.



2. The leader of Sme rodina and Speaker of Parliament, Boris Kollár is in hot water, surprisingly not over his organized crime connections, but because... it turns out that significant parts of his university* thesis were straight up copied and pasted from the internet**. The rest of the government seems to be dragging its feet on doing something about it, but Kollár has agreed to stop using his academic title (Slovakia is one of those pretentious countries where even people with just an undergrad write their name as "Bc. Johnny Smith").

Interestingly, Miroslav Beblavý, the leader of the Spolu half of PS-Spolu has played a major role in exposing this, so at least those guys are not completely useless despite shutting themselves out of parliament by the virtue of their own stupidity.

* This an extremely generous term; it's a degree mill in Skalica, a town of barely 15k people.
** Looking at him, you'll probably notice that Kollár is not exactly the youngest cohort, so this probably means that he didn't do this in his typical university-going years. Indeed, the thesis is is from 2015 - why would a man in his late 40s who already gained significant fortune with just high school education go into a joke university and then not even bother to pay someone to fake his thesis properly is beyond me.

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

Has he... ripped off the Polish Left's branding?

[Estrella]

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, today Estrella presents a special edition of Slovak Elections and Politics! Get ready for The Events of Past, What, Two Weeks — Now In Meme Form!™

Yeah, it's not just Mr. Nine Wives and Minister in charge of making students not cheat, but also the Prime Minister. If this were Czechia, where something like this is an end to your career, this would've been a very short-lived government indeed.

[Estrella]

Remember Marián Kočner and Alena Zsuzsová? I've mentioned them plenty of times in this thread and I'm not in the mood to explain them all over again for reasons that I'll get to in a second, but tl;dr. They're basically unofficial members of Smer (whatever is left of it anyway) and were suspected for a zillion of white collar crimes and ordering the murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak. A year ago, the trial about the latter started with those two among the defendants.

And today, they were acquitted.

F***ING. HELL.

Joke country. Curious how large will the protests get this weekend.

[Estrella]

Not in the mood for a long effortpost assessing the record of the government (which is just half a year old; feels much longer). But just to give you an idea of where things stand, have a poll. Numbers are rounded because lol decimals.

OĽANO 17%, Hlas 17%, SaS 12%, Smer 9%, Kotleba 9%, Sme rodina 9%, PS 7%, KDH 4%, Za ľudí 3%, others 13%

Pretty awful result for OĽANO. Yes, the 25% they got in the election was the result of a last-minute rally to the strongest anti-Smer force, but the truth his that while the government's record is actually pretty good, Matovič is unable to sell it because of his personality. His style of doing politics are clownish publicity stunts that make him look all folksy but also turn off many people (and the hick as fxck Trnava accent is just the cherry on top). I suspect some of that 8% who left him went to SaS - OĽANO has plenty of frankly insane fundamentalist Catholics and they've been talking about restricting abortions, something which SaS strongly opposes. SaS also likely gained voters from Za ľudí, who were always only a pet project of Andrej Kiska who now lost interest in them.

[Estrella]

Also, since we're in a new parliamentary term, I decide to reset the poll and leave out the parties that turned out to be irrelevant jokes.

Old results for posterity: Smer 6, SNS 5, Most 2, SaS 3, OĽANO 3, ĽSNS 2 (wtf‽), PS-Spolu 22, Za ľudí 1, Sme rodina 1, KDH 1, SMK 0, KSS 2, KÚ 0, Other 2, DV 1, Vlasť 0, Socialisti.sk 1, Hlas 0 = 52 votes.

[PSOL]

It seems that Hlas and Smer not only don’t affect one another, but benefit from being apart, which is weird.

And it must be painful for PS to be unable to make it to double digits with them having the Presidency.

[Estrella]

It seems that Hlas and Smer not only don’t affect one another, but benefit from being apart, which is weird.

Well, basically 90% of the population hate, hate Fico, but 10% still love him and those are the ones that stick to Smer. Pellegrini, on the other hand, is personally popular but his ambitions were dragged down by being associated with Fico. In the last election, Smer was saved from dropping into single digits by having Pellegrini be its public face (not the official leader, though) - there were enough voters who thought "I like Pelle and hate Fico, but I can hold my nose and vote for the Pelle-Fico party". Now that Pelle has his own party, he kept these voters and gained those for whom that was a step too far.

And it must be painful for PS to be unable to make it to double digits with them having the Presidency.

Čaputová's presidential campaign was always about being a civic anti-corruption anti-Smer candidate. PS had a short-lived bump after her win (that got them a victory in the EP), but she was never perceived as "the PS candidate".

In any case, Presidency is (fortunately) detached from partisan politics and elections are mostly a contest of personalities - a great example from the past is the 2004 presidential election. Ivan Gašparovič, leader of a party that won 3% in the last parliamentary elections got Jacques Chirac-ed into presidency against a wannabe dictator ex-PM after the frontrunner didn't get into the second round. In the first round, Gašparovič won 23%, but in the next parliamentary election, his party got... 0.6%.

[Estrella]

I doubt anyone is interested in this "mystery" except me, but whatever. You see, this is a section of the the Wikipedia page listing recipients of Order of White Double Cross, one of those worthless shiny metal things that's given out to foreign dignitaries like candy:



Notice something weird?

Yeah, I don't think there ever was a "Ricardo Escobar" in La Moneda. This isn't Wikipedia's mistake, by the way; official government websites, both Slovak and English, say the same thing. I'm guessing they confused this Señor Escobar with Ricardo Lagos, the real President of Chile at the time.

So who is that mysterious recipient? Turns out that it's not just some mangled name and he actually exists; he is Lagos' cousin-something-removed and became the head of Tax Service under Bachelet, so I can imagine him being a part of some international trade delegation a couple of years before that (he indeed worked for government's Foreign Investment Committee in the early 90s).

The "mystery" is solved, but I'm as confused as before. Like... how does this happen?

Edit:

ayyyyy lmao, now this was some wild overthinking. Turns out they got the right person and just picked the wrong surname: Ricardo Froilán Lagos Escobar.

Not deleting this post so that I can laugh at myself.

[Estrella]

You might remember how I mentioned earlier in this thread that a couple of years ago, Marián Kotleba, the leader of the neo-Nazi (as in Golden Dawn sort of neo-Nazi) party ĽSNS, was involved in a scandal. The scandal was, obviously, caused by ungrateful Brussels liberal media conducting a character assassination of him because he is a man with a great heart and loves to donate to people going through hardship... by giving them a cheque with a most interesting sum written on it:


Source: Pravda

Well, today he was convicted of spreading Nazi propaganda and sentenced to 4 years and 4 months in jail. He has appealed against the decision and it will most likely go all the way to Supreme Court, so it's not over yet.

Can you guess what extremely overused cliché beloved by far-right all over the world Kotleba used to defend himself? (Also, Orwell was a socialist who literally fought in a war against people like you, you f****** dingus)


Source: Sme