Election preview: Slovakia

This post isn’t part of my series on realignment (check out part three here), but as will become clear, it’s closely related. Slovakia goes to the polls tomorrow in a parliamentary election being held five months early, following the failure to construct a new government after the last one was defeated in a no-confidence vote last December.

The last Slovak election, in February 2020, saw the defeat of the Smer-SD party led by strong man and former prime minister Robert Fico. It was reduced to 18.3% of the vote and 38 of the 150 seats. Well ahead of it was the centre-right anti-corruption party Ordinary People, which won 25.0% and 53 seats. Another four parties won seats: the conservative We Are Family (17), two broadly liberal parties, Freedom & Solidarity (13) and For The People (12), and the neo-fascist People’s Party (17).

Ordinary People’s leader Igor Matovič became prime minister in a coalition government that also included We Are Family, Freedom & Solidarity and For The People. Despite its substantial majority, it ran into problems. In March 2021 controversy over the purchase of Russian Covid vaccines led to Matovič’s resignation and his replacement by finance minister Eduard Heger, although Matovič remained party leader.

Relations within the government continued to deteriorate, and in September 2022 the departure of Freedom & Solidarity, together with desertions from other parties, left the Heger government in a minority. Three months later it lost a vote of confidence, and after some months of constitutional manoeuvring an early election was agreed upon. Technocrat Ľudovít Ódor took office as caretaker prime minister in May.

As a result of its troubles in office, Ordinary People has plummeted in the polls and looks set to fall below 10%. Smer-SD has led in the polls for most of this year, but is still only marginally above its 2020 level, and it’s closely followed by Progressive Slovakia, a left-liberal party that narrowly failed to win representation last time* but is now polling in the high teens. In third place, in the low teens, is Hlas-SD, a breakaway from Smer-SD led by former prime minister Peter Pellegrini.

The careful reader might have noticed that I didn’t attach any ideological label to Smer-SD. In origins it is a left-wing party (the SD stands for Social Democracy), but under Fico’s leadership it became authoritarian, Eurosceptic and socially conservative (including strongly anti-immigrant); for a time he governed in coalition with far-right parties. Since last year it has particularly distinguished itself for being pro-Russian and anti-Ukraine.

Pellegrini seemed comfortable enough with the authoritarianism and the abandonment of many traditional left concerns, but he broke with Fico’s Putinism: Hlas-SD is pro-European and pro-Ukraine. But it remains to be seen whether it will be able to work with Progressive Slovakia and the other more liberal parties.

Several other parties are clustered in the polls in the mid- to high single digits. They include Ordinary People, Freedom & Solidarity and We Are Family; also Republic, a new neo-fascist party that has supplanted the People’s Party; the Slovak National Party, the more traditional mainstream far-right party; the Christian Democrats, who also just fell short of the threshold in 2020; and the Democrats (previously Together), a centre-right party now led by former prime minister Heger.

Depending on how many of these manage to clear the 5% mark, Hlas-SD seems likely to end up with the balance of power between, on the one hand, Smer-SD and its potential far-right allies, and on the other a fractious collection of mostly pro-European centre to centre-right parties. And while not much may turn on who actually finishes ahead as between Smer-SD and Progressive Slovakia, the psychological effect may be important (aided by the media, who will no doubt label one of them the “winner” even if their chance of forming government is slim).

So among other things Slovakia will be a test for just how important the Ukraine issue is for driving political alignment – especially in eastern Europe, where war fatigue is starting to put support for Ukraine in danger. It will also, more broadly, tell us something about the fortunes of formerly left-wing parties that abandon cosmopolitanism and accept the embrace of Vladimir Putin. We’ll have more to say about that topic next week.

(For more on Slovakia, Jason Burke’s report from Bratislava in the Guardian is excellent.)

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* The reason it failed is a little complicated. There is a 5% threshold, but that rises to 7% for coalitions of two or three parties. Progressive Slovakia was running in coalition with the centre-right Together, and between them they scored 6.97%, missing out by less than a thousand votes.