How Elections Turned into Slovak Democracy’s Biggest Threat

At some point, democracy in Slovakia stopped being about political pluralism and became an occasion for collective paranoia.

LEO and Andrej Kolárik

Jun 05, 2026

Article voiceover

0:00

-19:25

Once, when I was sitting with my aunt in the living room, she muttered “Perhaps we Slovaks will never learn how to govern ourselves.” She continued, in the same sad, resigned tone, recalling the 1990s when the question of our independence from Czechia was fiercely debated: “splitting from the Czechs was a mistake. We should have never parted ways. I said it back then, that we [the Slovaks] will be at each other’s throats.”

I could hardly contradict her: the deep divisions in current Slovak society seem, in retrospect, to prove her stance. We were both witnessing a battle between two Slovakias, and wondered whether the country would be doomed, should the other Slovakia get its way.

Since the end of the Cold War, Slovakia´s place in the popular imagination was almost nonexistent, and was frequently confused with Slovenia. This was the case to such an extent that both countries’ embassies regularly met to exchange diplomatic correspondence that had been delivered to the wrong country.

When travelling abroad, I still find that evoking the now dissolved Czechoslovakia is the most efficient way of putting Slovakia on a mental map. The Czechs, the Poles, and the Magyars all have had their famous kings, their virtuous noblemen, and cunning statesmen — a history of statecraft on which to draw. In Slovakia we lack this. We seldom display our national flag in places other than official buildings — or on days when our national hockey or football teams have a game. Our politicians were eager to outcompete the Czechs, Magyars, and Poles by Slovakia being the first of the V4 countries to adopt the euro, thereby winning a race the others were not even participating in.

The contrast between urban Slovakia and its countryside has always existed, and mirrors similar trends across Europe. In Bratislava, its capital, rainbow flags often outnumber Slovak ones. People gather in LGBT-friendly cafés and bookshops. They keep telling me democracy in Slovakia is under grave threat. The threat appears to be severe and ever-present. Only the continuous mobilisation of the opposition through street protests — accompanied by regular theatre discussions titled “How to Save Democracy”, organised across the country by opposition-friendly media — has thus far prevented Slovakia from becoming a ruthless dictatorship, where all is bread and circuses, public money is redirected to politically connected oligarchs, the opposition is silenced, and a Slexit will be brought about in just a few weeks.

At times, I am wondering whether we inhabit different realities, and are talking about the same country. After all, elections still come and go according to schedule, constitutional amendments still reflect public majorities.^[1] However, I am quickly reminded of an imminent state capture, rampant corruption, and democratic backsliding. Indeed, should things continue the way they are, Slovakia risks drifting away into a post-Soviet geopolitical void, with Lukashenko´s Belarus becoming our reality.

But as I travel to the countryside, to villages nestled in our deep valleys, I see a totally different Slovakia. One which renounces gender-inclusive language for being gibberish, and is more concerned with job security. Visiting family and friends often involves imbibing several glasses of home-distilled slivovica, and the singing of old ballads well past midnight.

The city and the countryside may disagree over policies, they may distrust each other, but it was not so long ago when we accepted that the mechanism of elections acted as a fair referee. But by some, the ordinary voter is trusted less than the Humphrey Applebys^[2] who subscribe to a pro-European and trans-atlantic geopolitical alignment.

For others, it is a question of preserving common sense in the face of ideological snobs locked in their ivory towers. Awaiting election results has transformed into a collective paranoia, as each side fears that their compatriots’ wrong choice may doom the country´s democracy altogether. How did our nation find itself in this deep political rift, when we can’t even trust our own compatriots anymore?

An Election Between Democrats and Their Enemies

The 1998 election is among the most formative elections in the Slovaks’ public imagination. As the prevailing political mythology remembers it, what was at stake was the very admission into European civilisation itself, symbolised by the prospect of future EU and NATO membership.

The villain of the story was Vladimír Mečiar, Prime Minister of Slovakia. It is somewhat ironic that his party was called People´s Party: Movement for a Democratic Slovakia. Opposing him was the Slovak Democratic Coalition, an alliance bringing together parties from across the political spectrum, united by a shared determination to remove Mečiar from power. Questions of economic policy or philosophical differences became secondary to the civilisational struggle over Slovakia’s geopolitical and democratic future.

The election presented a narrative which would shape future perspectives on elections, far outlasting the political career of Vladimír Mečiar.

Even decades later, Mikuláš Dzurinda, who was at the forefront of the Slovak Democratic Coalition in 1998 and became the pro-European and transatlanticist Prime Minister afterwards, referenced U.S. State Secretary Madeleine Albright’s comment on Slovakia under the Mečiar government as the “black hole of Europe”.^[3] He was not alone. Slovak opposition figures repeatedly portrayed current Prime Minister Robert Fico as being a Vladimír Mečiar 2.0.^[4]

Return of Existential Elections

Existential questions were eventually settled and a broad consensus emerged. In 2004, Slovakia joined the EU and NATO. Three years later, it joined Schengen, and in 2009 it adopted the Euro. Politics became a conventional contest between centre-right reformists and social democrats led by a young Robert Fico.

In 2013, Banská Bystrica, the epicenter of the Slovak National Uprising against the Axis powers during World War II, elected Marián Kotleba as its regional governor. The result caught everyone by surprise; famously, Robert Fico boasted that even “a bag of potatoes would defeat Marián Kotleba”.^[5] Commentators were ringing the alarm, as Marián Kotleba was not your typical nationalist. For instance, he combined anti-Roma rhetoric with allusions to the Axis Slovak State during World War II. How was it possible that neo-Nazism, from having been thrown into the dustbin of history, was making a comeback?

The immediate response was to reshape the very terms on which elections were being held. In the next regional election, parties both left and right abandoned their usual quarrels, fielding a single candidate to ensure Kotleba’s defeat.^[6] Sometimes, it seems, elections produce results which are unacceptable.

When Kotleba’s party won 8,04% of the vote and secured 14 parliamentary seats in 2016, President Andrej Kiska openly refused even to consult with Kotleba’s party during coalition talks^[7]. The dam against extremism became the Slovak equivalent of Belgium’s cordon sanitaire and Germany’s Brandmauer. While a strategy to defeat Kotleba by making better arguments may have actually proven effective, institutional boycott was chosen as a containment strategy.

Share LEO

Citizen, You Are Disinformed

Following the Russian annexation of Crimea, Slovak public discourse gradually accustomed itself to the more frequent use of terms such as hybrid warfare, anti-disinformation campaigns, and Russian propaganda.

A whole ecosystem of institutions emerged that worked towards protecting democracy from disinformation. Some claimed their mission to be nothing other than building an open and confident society, one capable of defending its liberal democratic system against sustained attacks^[8]. Others plainly stated: Slovak population exhibits high degree of susceptibility towards disinformation^[9].

Disinformation and hybrid warfare were the problems; fact-checking, media literacy, and critical thinking declared their solutions. A blacklist of disinformation sites called “konšpirátori.sk” (Conspirators. sk) was created in 2016, officially as an initiative to protect advertisers from their ads being displayed on websites promoting conspiracy theories, disinformation, and hate speech^[10].

This model offered a comforting explanation of the Kotleba election. The citizens, while electing him, were not morally bad, but had been merely manipulated. Neither was Kotleba proven right. The citizens had just been lied to, otherwise they would have never elected an extremist, would they? It offered an easy solution. But it came at a terrible cost.

Citizens, once having become victims of propaganda, are to be lectured on critical thinking, their social media algorithms having to be adjusted. After all, how can they be trusted to decide the fates of countries? Or so the logic goes. It is a perspective which still gives credence to democratic legitimacy, but with allegiance to a specific ideology as a necessary precondition .

Who Would Not Be For a Decent Slovakia?

In 2018 Ján Kuciak, an investigative journalist who had uncovered cases of suspected tax fraud and evasions as well as the suspicious ownership of properties by certain businesses, was murdered along with his fiancée Martina. It took Slovakia by surprise; the public response to the shock shifted from the murder itself to a public outrage against the confluence of political and oligarchic power, as embodied by Robert Fico’s corrupt party.

Prior to 2018, the centrist-liberal spectrum may have been suspicious of Robert Fico due to corruption allegations and his political style, but he remained a part of the consensus. At times, commentators even seemed to prefer Robert Fico speaking about the necessity to belong to a vaguely defined EU core^[11] over the right-wing economically liberal Richard Sulík, who was unwilling to support a bailout for Greece and was critical of further EU centralisation.

Two centre-right parties (Sieť of Radovan Procházka and Most-Híd of Béla Bugár) even sat in a coalition government with Robert Fico at the time: something which has been inconceivable since 2018.

Following the Kuciak murders came a series of protests named “For a Decent Slovakia”; social media filled up with profiles with the hashtag #AllForJan, on which not necessarily policy changes, but a restoration of morality and responsibility in politics were being demanded. The demonstrations were the largest civic mobilisation since 1998.

If some political forces represented a “decent Slovakia,” others were denied this adjective and became associated with its opposite. Some parties were admissible as coalition partners, while others were delegitimised once the spectre of 1998’s election was invoked, portraying Robert Fico as a new Vladimír Mečiar to be vanquished. It borrowed the distinction between “democratic” and non-democratic parties from the boycott of Marián Kotleba, whilst also weaving in geopolitical anxieties.

The first reaction of Robert Fico him taking a page from an old Western movie; like a would-be sheriff, he held a press conference during which he promised a million euros (ostentatiously displayed on the table^[12]) to anyone who knew anything surrounding the case. Was this only hollow spectacle?

But that wasn´t all. Robert Fico then switched from Wild West tough-guy showmanship to Cold War paranoia. He spoke about president Andrej Kiska’ trip to the United States, accusing him of having met with George Soros in New York^[13].

Attempts to delegitimise the protests as a result of foreign interference were dismissed as conspiracy theories, and attempts to uncover the influence of Soros’ Open Society Foundation were considered further proof of a country being subverted by a plethora of hoaxes and disinformation.

Crisis After Crisis

The moral purification campaign seemed to reach its zenith in the 2020 elections. Fico was vanquished, and a rather chaotic populist movement (with anti-corruption sentiment as its primary motivator) came into power, with Igor Matovič assuming the office of Prime Minister. The coalition government that formed was held together by a shared antipathy towards Robert Fico, rather than by a coherent vision for the country in the years ahead.

In other circumstances, such a government may have struggled only to solve its own internal quarrels. But times were far from ordinary, as crisis followed crisis in rapid succession, from Covid-19 pandemic through Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; all unfolded amid chaotic government communication, internal coalition conflicts, and growing public exhaustion.

Dissent from the state and media narrative on Covid-19 or the war in Ukraine was no longer a manifestation of healthy pluralism—it was interpreted as being disinformation, as a sign of hybrid warfare.

With citizens susceptible to becoming misinformed and manipulated, elections could become potential security risks undermining the very foundations of the political order itself.

In 2022 a private agency working as a state contractor called Gerulata Technologies published a blacklist titled Exposing Russian propaganda network in Slovakia^[14]. Gerulata admitted it did not examine the veracity of the information this network spread, only their pro-Russian orientation was what mattered. Neither did they consider other narratives those who had found themselves on their blacklist promoted.^[15]

The political pluralism which was celebrated after the fall of Communism underwent a subtle change to “liberal democracy”. Few noticed it. When in 2022 Milan Krajniak, at that time Minister of Labour, Social Affairs and Family, objected to the term “liberal democracy” to be included in a document on the development of civil society, the substance of the objection itself was hardly tackled.

Krajniak was told that he simply misunderstood the meaning of the term.^[16] Yet it does signify specific ideological orientation, just as terms like Christian democracy or social democracy do, perhaps suggesting that there are some election outcomes, ideological profiles and geopolitical instincts that are more legitimate than others.

The Paradoxes Of the Present

Following the inevitable collapse of the Igor Matovič government, Robert Fico returned. While elections take place at regular intervals and parties campaign freely, elections are no longer moments of genuine democratic choice. Rather, they became moments of collective paranoia, as a deep chasm separates the educated, ‘democratic’ Bratislava cafeteria voters from their rural, pub-visiting, populist compatriots.

Since 2023, the ‘defenders of democracy’ have become entangled in a growing number of paradoxes that become harder and harder to reconcile. Firstly, saving democracy in the countless discussions organised by one of the opposition-aligned media actually means not necessarily relying on the prudent judgement of the electorate as a whole.

Elections risk producing wrong results—when they do, opposition supporters take to the streets in protest. Ironically, the problem with this was identified by a publicist from the opposition’s own camp. Samuel Marec, a columnist at the opposition-aligned SME.sk published a book titled How to get rid of anxiety in Slovakia and how to defeat Robert Fico.^[17] In it, he addressed his fellow opposition supporters, arguing that their discussions on “How to save democracy” were but collective therapy sessions, which failed to tackle the core issue.

He also reprimanded them for demanding a rigid ideological purity from their potential allies and sympathisers. Unable to win elections through the ballot, he claimed, have led some to being condescending towards those who rejected their views, while claiming the term democracy for their own camp.

Secondly, the label of opponents as “Russian agents” or “Putin assets” became more frequent. Not only has any form of sympathy towards the Eurasian power become considered highly suspect, but the label has also begun to lose significance. Those who use them have become almost a mirror image of their ideological opponents accusing their rivals of having ties to George Soros.

Although the liberal establishment used to caricature accusations of someone being a Soros agents as conspiracy theories, their own practice of discovering alleged Russian agents betrays the same penchant for conspiracy theorising: presuming the existence of an alleged secret network, subservient to a real-life version of Lord of the Rings’ dark lord Sauron.

Thirdly, the more urgent the struggle to save democracy, and the more the conviction that Slovakia´s fate in the transatlantic and European structures is at stake grows, the more political plurality within the democratic camp itself becomes a luxury rather than a necessity.

In moments of perceived emergency, cohesion is prioritised. The range of acceptable opinions narrows accordingly. Conservative voices are tolerated insofar as they support the general “democratic” consensus; almost invariably, any of their independent initiatives are met with an almost allergic reaction.

In my country, as in others, this is unlikely to change soon.

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

LEO

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?