BRATISLAVA — Slovakia’s parliamentary election produced more confusion than clarity. There’s no obvious path to a stable government, raising the prospect of political crisis just months before the country takes over the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union.
Although Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico’s center-left Direction-Social Democracy (Smer-SD) party technically won with 28.3 percent, according to results posted after 99 percent of the votes were counted, a severely divided electorate sent eight very different parties to parliament, including two far-right ones.
The result gives Smer 49 seats in the 150-member parliament. Second is the liberal Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) party with 21 seats, whose leader Sunday began walking back an earlier pledge to never work with Fico.
The populist Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OL’aNO) has 19 seats and has also ruled out a coalition with Smer. The far-right Slovak National Party (SNS), a previous Fico coalition partner, took 15 seats. The neo-Nazi People’s Party Our Slovakia (LSNS) led by Marian Kotleba, is in parliament for the first time with 14 places — it is being blacklisted by the other parties. It is followed by the new center-right We Are Family party with 11 places, which says it won’t back Fico. Most-Híd, which caters to the country’s Hungarian minority and balks at any alliance with Slovak nationalists, took 11 places. Finally, the center-right Network party (Siet’), led by the Yale-educated lawyer Radoslav Procházka and once thought to be Smer’s prime challenger, barely scraped into parliament with 10 seats.
Though far-right and populist parties fared well in the Slovak election, the results were hardly conclusive. Fico emerges severely weakened.
Here are five key takeaways from the election results:
1. In Kiska’s court
The chaotic election result prompted President Andrej Kiska to cancel his program at a women’s World Cup ski race in Jasná on Sunday morning. Early speculation has focused on the possibility he will appoint a caretaker unity government to carry the country through its turn at the EU Council presidency in the latter half of this year. In that scenario, new elections would follow in early 2017.
Kiska is a former entrepreneur, and a pro-EU Atlanticist. In 2014 he defeated Fico by a hefty margin in a presidential runoff. His New Year’s address drew attention to the country’s shambolic health and education sectors that proved decisive in weakening Smer’s appeal.
Kiska also struck a starkly different tone to Fico in the migration crisis. While Fico warned darkly of the danger posed by Muslims, Kiska emphasized human rights.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (right) welcomes Slovakia’s President Andrej Kiska (left) at the European Commission headquarters in Brussels on March 3, 2015 | Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty
A caretaker government would successfully marginalize the two ultra-nationalist parties, but freezing them out in the long run could help their popularity by buttressing their argument that the country’s elites ignore them and their voters.
Fico insisted Sunday that he was going to try to build a governing coalition because his party had the highest vote total. He looks intent on leading whatever government emerges when the smoke clears, but some are now mentioning current Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajčák as a possibility as well.
2. Fico stumbles
Before election day, many observers felt Fico was set to cruise to victory for a third term as prime minister. But Smer’s poll numbers saw a steady decline since the start of the year. The party’s 28 percent share of the vote is 16 percentage points lower than its 2012 haul that saw it form a single-party government.
Fico repeatedly sought to emphasize the dangers posed by refugees and the party campaign slogan was “We Protect Slovakia.” However, strikes by teachers and a walkout by nurses this year radically recast the campaign and put the focus on topics where Smer performs poorly with the public.
Conventional wisdom says that by priming fears of migrants, Fico actually aided the far-right parties, but exit polls found that Kotleba’s supporters were most concerned with social inequality and corruption — not migrants. At a minimum, Fico created an atmosphere of fear that had unpredictable consequences.
He may have made a mistake by not simply focusing on the country’s strong macroeconomic numbers, like 3.6 percent GDP growth in 2015.
Despite the weak result, Fico was still speaking with confidence on Sunday, calling his party “the most successful political project in the modern history of Slovakia.” But Fico’s reputation as the country’s political master strategist has taken a beating. He badly miscalculated the mood of the electorate.
3. The rise of the ultra-nationalists
Two far-right parties will enter parliament, with Kotleba’s LSNS a particularly virulent bunch. The migration crisis no doubt played a role, but Kotleba — who has expressed support for the Nazi-allied wartime Slovak state and governed the Banská Bystrica region in recent years — looks to have broader appeal. According to exit polls, some 22 percent of first time voters chose the party, which seems to have a struck chord with its general anti-establishment stance.
“The main problem in Slovakia is standard of living,” said Michal Havran, a philosopher and television host. “In Western countries, all political campaigns depend on that. Here people are fixated on symbolic politics.”
Marian Kotleba, head of the ultra-nationalist Our Slovakia party LSNS | Str/AFP/Getty
But the party won’t find many allies in parliament. Fico said Sunday that LSNS “does not come into consideration” as a coalition partner.
While nationalists did well, traditional parties were punished. Stalwarts of the country’s center right, like the Christian Democrats (KDH) and the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKÚ) did not make it to parliament. Most-Híd is the only traditional right-leaning party in the legislature.
Opposition parties largely were wary of challenging Fico’s anti-migrant rhetoric as 89 percent of Slovaks are opposed to EU reallocation quotas. “They did not confront Fico enough,” said Aneta Világi, a political scientist at Comenius University in Bratislava. “They thought they could attract voters from Smer.”
Civil society groups, not opposition parties, shifted the debate this year with teachers, nurses and unions — along with Kiska — taking the lead. Slovaks were looking for someone else to vote for, but had trouble identifying who that should be, leading to a gaggle of parties in parliament.
4. Clouds over EU presidency
Slovakia holds the EU Council presidency in the second half of the year. The country’s professional bureaucracy has been preparing for the better part of two years and a unity government would likely bring a steady hand amid troubled times for the EU.
Even if Fico were to lead that government, his anti-migrant rhetoric would almost certainly soften. The EU’s ability to manage any new budgetary crisis in Greece would be less assured, however, as the election’s second place finisher SaS brought down a center-right government in 2012 when it refused to contribute to the EU bailout plan.
The presidency is also expected to deal with the so-called gas package under which the European Commission hopes to gain the power to assess intergovernmental agreements on energy contracts in advance. This has particular relevance as applied to the proposed Nord Stream 2 pipeline project carrying Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea. Central Europe, and Slovakia in particular, oppose this plan. Bratislava could lose up to €1 billion per year in transit fees for the gas it pumps from the Ukrainian border to the rest of Europe.
5. Central Europe’s “illiberal democracies”
The so-called Visegrád Four countries — Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia — have been seen as the core of the EU’s supposed illiberal democracies. In Poland and Hungary, both governments have consolidated power and moved to gain political control over key institutions like the media and the judiciary while muting checks and balances on government power. But the Czech Republic and Slovakia haven’t been as easy to fit into the same mold.
Though far-right and populist parties fared well in the Slovak election, the results were hardly conclusive. Fico emerges severely weakened. Less ideological, and more pragmatic than Jarosław Kaczyński or Viktor Orbán to begin with, Smer’s post-election weakness makes it difficult to see how it could follow in Hungary and Poland’s path by tightening its grip on the court system, for example.
“Fico is much less determined to deconstruct institutions,” said Oľga Gyárfášová, a sociologist with the Institute for Public Affairs in Bratislava.