Slovak Independence Has Been a Big Success
She has been active in Slovakia, with interruptions, for over 30 years. In 1992, she was shocked by the dissolution of Czechoslovakia; today, she thinks differently and hopes she is also wrong about the disaster called Brexit, which her home country effectively voted for in the early parliamentary general election held in December. The British political scientist Karen Henderson, who has been lecturing at CU’s Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences since 2013, talked with us about the specificities of Slovak politics, the key topics of the upcoming election and the shortcomings of the proposals to reform our electoral system.
You have been observing the political developments in Slovakia for more than 30 years. As a political scientist and both an insider and a foreigner, was there anything that surprised you during this period?
If I’m honest, I was appalled at Czechoslovakia dividing into two states, but in retrospect I was wrong and despite all the problems, Slovak independence has been a big success. People have found a way to overcome challenges, even if it takes time. I supported Scottish independence because I’ve seen how well a nation of 5 million can do on its own, and when people talk about all the economic disasters that would hit Scotland if it was independent. I remember the horrible 1992 predictions of what would happen to an independent Slovakia and don’t take it so seriously. In my darkest moments thinking about the Brexit disaster, I tell myself that I was wrong about Slovak independence so just maybe I could be wrong about Brexit...
How did you get to Slovakia? And why did you decide to focus your scientific research on our politics? What led you to this decision?
I started learning Czech in 1986. I had studied Russian and Soviet politics but had travelled a lot in what was then called the Eastern Bloc and found it more interesting, so I began researching the politics of the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia. I wanted to spend a year in Prague as a British Council scholar in 1987–88, but about a month before I was due to leave I got a letter saying ‘Congratulations. You have been accepted to study at Comenius University in Bratislava’. So I went and bought myself the only teach-yourself-Slovak book that existed at that time, frantically finished emptying my flat in London and packing my suitcases, and opened my new book as the train pulled out of Victoria Station.
For a while in the early 1990s I carried on studying the Czech Republic as well as Slovakia, but politics here was more interesting and everyone in the west seemed to get it wrong. With EU accession becoming such a major political issue, there was actually a market for talking about Slovak politics, which was a benefit for me. I also found the academic community here very open. Slovaks have the knack of being both spontaneous and flexible and quite organised at the same time, which makes this a rewarding place to live.
Are there any specificities in Slovak politics that you have not noticed thus far in other countries?
Three things strike me about Slovak politics. The first is how active and involved civil society is. People tend to think civil society means NGOs, but what I notice is the engagement of ordinary citizens. They are prepared to have political arguments with their relatives to try and change their minds about who to vote for, and they are much more likely to go on demonstrations than people at home. After all, the last prime minister was prompted to resign by widespread street protests.
The second thing is the unpredictability of election outcomes. Foreigners often ask me who is going to win the next Slovak election and want a simple answer. Instead, I explain that with one exception – to mind, that exception is 1998 – the election result was a surprise no-one had predicted. So the only thing that’s predictable is the unpredictability. That’s not usually the answer they’re looking for.
The third thing is the marked party fragmentation among what are currently the opposition parties. I can understand that the opposition needs a progressive left, a liberal centre and a conservative right, but who on earth needs six different parties? The odd thing is that all these opposition parties are on what’s vaguely perceived to be the ‘right’ of the political spectrum. It’s less common for them to fish in the so-called left side of the pond, where it could be much easier to find new voters. It still looks to me as if parties are differentiated primarily by their people and not by their programmes, but that’s not really unique to Slovakia, but more of a regional issue.
How do you perceive Slovakia after the murder of an investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová in February 2018 and all the revelations that came shortly afterwards? In your opinion, to what extent will it affect the upcoming parliamentary election?
The revelations were fairly awful but I am less pessimistic than some people. The public outcry at the murders was important: this is clearly not a country where you can get away with murdering a journalist. Although the trial is still underway, there’s already been a conviction and another of the accused has confessed. However bad revelations are for Slovakia’s image, the situation is still far better than if the level of corruption had remained hidden.
It’s hard to guess the effect the trial will have on the elections. I am tempted to think that electoral preferences have already shifted as much as they are likely to because of the official corruption revealed, but there may still be a sensational revelation in the next month that could change the electoral playing field.
Which topics in the ongoing election campaign do you consider to be crucial to the election? In addition, is one of these a topic you cannot imagine to be effective in the United Kingdom, yet it works on a non-insignificant number of voters in Slovakia?
The election seems to be about trust. Whether you think the politicians are honest is more important than what their programme says. Also, what’s very noticeable to a foreigner is that we don’t hear very much about the party election programmes because the television news is not allowed to talk about the elections. In Britain and the USA, politicians are often accused of talking in ‘sound bites’ – clever one-sentence slogans that they put into their election speeches, knowing that the TV companies will probably only show two or three sentences of their speech on the TV news. No need to do that in Slovakia because all that will be on TV are your campaign adverts and what your leaders say in the carefully controlled TV debates. So the party can control its message and make it more complicated.
Some topics are different though. In the UK, young people are angry because they feel they have been betrayed by the older generation, who had better life chances than them: they had a free university education, better pensions, job security and could afford to buy a flat or a house. In Slovakia, there’s still an assumption that, by and large, younger voters will have better lives than their parents and grandparents, who were badly affected by the communist period. Maybe that’s why you don’t hear quite as much about the dangers of climate change here: for young British voters, this is yet another betrayal by the older generation and they won’t tolerate it.
The coverage of immigration in Slovakia also seems incredibly primitive and racist. In western Europe, only a fascist or far-right party would put out election adverts showing negative images of crowds of people of another race. Perhaps it’s because immigration here is still so low that there’s no debate on the real issues involved. But given how many Slovaks migrate, the hostility towards migration does seem pretty bizarre to a foreigner.
You focus on Euroscepticism, as well. What role does it play in Slovak politics nowadays?
I don’t think Euroscepticism has ever been particularly prominent. Some parties have ideological objections to aspects of EU policy but these have never really resonated with ordinary people. The reality is that there are huge financial incentives for Slovakia to remain in the EU and it also provides Slovaks with the opportunity to live and work abroad while relatively few foreigners come and compete in the labour market here. The EU also provides small states with a voice and a veto that they would not otherwise have. Slovaks often complain that large states such as Germany have too much power in the EU, but let’s look at it at the level of the citizen: individually, each of the 80 million Germans, whose government chooses one European commissioner, has a smaller voice than the 5 million Slovaks, whose government also chooses one European commissioner.
Where hostility to the EU arises it is often a more generalised fear of globalisation and a scary outside world. Political propaganda has made Slovaks scared of immigration and I notice that parties are now more cautious about talking of all the things they will use EU funds to achieve, but the Eurosceptic discourse lacks much coherence.
In the past, there were several proposals to reform our electoral system from the proportional system we have now to a majoritarian or a mixed one. The main argument is to get more regional deputies into the parliament who would be well-informed about the problems in their region and would have a motivation to do something about it since they would feel a bigger responsibility to meet their obligations to their constituents. Do you think it would help?
Slovakia has a great electoral system that has served the country really well, so why change it? I don’t think the argument about a majoritarian or mixed system providing more regional deputies is valid either. Firstly, deciding a politician must live in the region that they represent makes life difficult for a talented politician who lives in a region where the party they support is not very popular, which means it’s hard for them to get elected. Secondly, even if a new Slovak law said parliamentary deputies had to live in the place they represent, politicians would find the usual Slovak solution to the problem: as we know, lots of people in Slovakia are formally registered and vote in a place where they don’t really live and the system tolerates this. For example, a lot of professional people move to cities for their work, and if they belong to a party not popular in cities they could simply register themselves at a house in the village they come from. And what’s the problem? Bratislava is full of people who love the region they come from, travel there very often and care about the problems faced by their family there.
Karen Henderson
She is a British lecturer in European Studies and Political Science, who joined CU’s Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences at the end of 2013 after many years of collaboration. She was previously a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Leicester, where she had been working since 1990. She has written widely on both the domestic politics of the Slovak Republic and EU eastern enlargement, focusing in particular on Euroscepticism and the influence of domestic politics on EU decision-making. She is also a frequent commentator on UK politics for the Slovak media.
Erika Hubčíková