No matter how disappointing or alarming the election results in Slovakia are, make no mistake, they cannot be treated as a real surprise. There are very few parallels, if any, between the rise of Marine Le Pen, UKIP, and AfD in Western Europe and the rise of far-right extremists in Slovakia. The root causes of the election outcomes are logical results of local trends, some of them long-term, underlying the political scene since the division of Czechoslovakia. The “threat of immigration” seems to have played a minor role in voters’ decision-making. No matter how good a populist you are and how much fear you can instigate initially, if the perceived threat does not materialize for a long time, the audience will not only stop fearing, but lose trust in you as a story-teller.
First and foremost, it is important to keep in mind that it was the Smer-SD party that won the elections for the fourth time in a row. No other party even comes close to such a colossal political presence, which is even more impressive when considering that since 2012, they have held power alone. Smer-SD is a nominally social democratic party and a member of PES, in reality more centrist and in many aspects closer to Chancellor Merkel’s CDU than SPD. The party that came second, the neo-liberal, pro-business, laissez-faire, LGBT-friendly though xenophobic, and Eurosceptic SaS, got less than half the amount of Smer-SD votes, although two months before the elections it was still unclear whether they would cross the 5 percent threshold to remain in parliament.
Secondly, unforgivable and scandalous as it was, the prime minister’s Islamophobic rhetoric does not seem to have had much influence on the gains of right-wing extremists, and this is supported by exit-poll and post-poll socio-demographic data. The “threat of immigration” seems to have played a minor role in voters’ decision-making. The lesson is that no matter how good a populist you are and how much fear you can instigate initially, if the perceived threat does not materialize for a long time, the audience will not only stop fearing, but lose trust in you as a story-teller. The legendary master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock might have had a word or two of advice for Robert Fico’s campaign managers.
Full Article: Slovak Elections: Unpleasant, But No Big Surprise | World Policy Institute.