Get a feel for Slovak politics. The Slovak political arena is unbearably ridiculous

Where to start?

• A party literally called ‘we are a family’ – ‘sme rodina’ has as its main guy a dude who has a fetish for impregnating women. He makes a woman pregnant, sets her up with flat and an allowance and then impregnates another one. I don’t know the official tally, but he has about 10 kids with about as many women. His name is Boris Kollar. According to my source he built his career by trading special coupons one could use under communism to buy luxury foreign goods. One needed coupons to buy these at special Tuzex shops and this guy traded those coupons on the black market. It’s absurd cases like this that have made lots of Slovaks lose faith.
• the leader of the biggest catholic party has recently called the LGBT community a ‘plague’ (‘pliaga’ in Slovak). Former Prime Minister Fico has called LGBT ‘the new faciscm’
• many Slovaks consider Bratislava to be a different country, the ‘real’ Slovakia is the rest of the country, it’s there you can find people who take everything Putin says and stands for as the Gospel. The population of Bratislava is relatively educated and is generally more positive and accepting
• Slovakia has a serious problem with its Roma minority. There about half a million Roma here and Roma kids are often labeled as ‘handicapped’ so they can be put in separate classes to segregate them from whites
• Slovakia is the only country that paid Nazi Germany to deport its jewish population. They paid 500 DM per Jew. This is almost never talked about. It’s certainly not a well-known fact, not even in Slovakia itself
• If something doesn’t run properly in Slovakia many people blame the malfunctioning on the legacy of communism. Strangely there are also lots of people who claim the opposite and say everything function better under communism. So this other camp blames everything that goes wrong here on the FALL of communism, not on the damage the communist system did
• nobody says harsher things about Slovaks than Slovaks themselves (maybe am often so critical of Slovaks because some days I almost feel like I am Slovak…)
• you can find quite a few Slovaks who will say that the Czechs exploited the Slovaks in the time of the existence of Czechoslovia. This is patently false. In general Slovaks often claim they have always been exploited by other nations and were ‘slaves’. They were never slaves… Serfs? Agricultural laborers with limited freedom? Yes, but that counts for most people in medieval Europe.
• Slovaks will often call other Slovaks ‘idiots’ and ‘sheep’ who are always looking for a strong man to herd them. Someone like Fico for example. For a Slovak politician to be succesful his words don’t matter much, it’s his confident macho strongman behaviour that matters. Slovakia is a country full of contradictions, because in a country where the world is still very much a man’s world one of the most elegant, charming, sensible female politicians was elected president: Caputova. She got treated so brutally by some that she refused to run for reelection.
• economically Slovakia has chosen to depend a lot on the automobile industry and its economy is quite closely linked to the German economy. It would make sense if many Slovaks spoke German, because of this economical fact and also because of its German speaking neighbour Austria, but young Slovaks usually speak English, but have no active knowledge of German. Speaking of languages: I would guess about ten percent of Slovaks speak Hungarian at home.
• one of Slovakia’s most passionate and experienced magazine editors, Stefan Hrib, describes Slovakia as an oligarchy where crazier things happen than in Poland and Hungary, but somehow Slovak politicians get away with all this
• the Slovak church is more conservative than elsewhere in Europe and often tries to meddle in politics. When the aforementioned Caputova was running for president a bishop publicly stated it was a sin to vote for her
• So far there hasn’t been a major pedophile scandal connected to the Slovak Church. This is of course only a matter of time. So far the Church here has too much influence and power and lack of outside control for something like this to erupt
• former Prime Minister Matovic is clearly suffering from some kind of mental illness and often displays the most clownnesque behavior. For example when he went to hand in his resignation papers he immediately grabbed them back. I have it on good authority that he s been hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic for bipolar disorder. He is good at putting himself in the spotlight, but he is so erratic and silly he can t possibly be a true leader. From time to time he makes headlines by posting extremely silly things like ‘I am hetero’ on his FB page. Last week he got into something of a lame fist fight with Kalinak, a likewise controversial politician from the ranks of Fico’s SMER, see picture above
• personally I would characterize Slovakia as a state that functions more like a cluster of tribes, deeply patriarchal, divided, unripe for democracy and independence, still searching for a real identity, torn between the past (communism) and the future (liberal democracy, multiculturalism, personal initiative and less ‘nanny state’), torn between west (EU) and east (Russia), lots of almost hilarious populism, very susceptible to conspiracy theories, with a strong nucleus of young, vibrant intellectuals trying to fight for a more progressive democracy… If they don’t give up and pack their bags and move out west…

Questions?