In Mid-June 2006 Slovakia is going to experience its 6th general elections since the fall of communism. I know you don’t give a fiddler’s fuck, but I decided to go through the motions anyway and introduce to you the main players of this our
Part 1
The bad
The ABCs of Robert Fico (Ambitious Bolshevik Cretin)
Robert Fico is the leader of the main opposition party SMER – Social Democracy, a party poised to win the June elections. The polls are giving his party some 30% at the moment, at least some 10 percentage points ahead of his other competitors. Robert Fico is really, really, really eager to win this election, since he was already poised to win the last one in 2002. Politics knows no such fury as an ambition insatiated. Back then his party (then titled SMER – the Third Way) came in third, though our dear Robert already saw himself as the new PM. Now enraged by his long, long opposition, hardened in parliamentary struggles against the "radical rightwing government" of Mikuláš Dzurinda and strengthened by swallowing other small leftwing parties, he is once again the prime candidate for the job of the prime minister. But his swaggering ambition and impatience could still cost him the elections just like last time, when his overzealous campaigning lost him a few votes. His impatience is probably partly driven by the shady elements that form his main financial backing: the various nomenclature managers and communist cadre entrepreneurs that got rich during the era of Vladimir Mečiar. The type of guys that don’t like to see the dwindling power of the state over the economy and overall political influence in everyday affairs, since such "radical right-wing" policies help to rule out the possibilities of foul play, corruption and rent-seeking.Forgive me for not being impartial, but he is also the living embodiment of all that I loathe and despise in politicians. He is a demagogue (I know, I know, every politician is one, but there are still degrees of decency even in this area), an opportunist posturing (I hope, for his own mental health that he isn’t sincere) as a leftwing raving loony moon-bat, he is a national socialist and a lawyer. A populist who once advocated the death penalty (knowing very well that in ze Modern Europe such a thing is verboten) pampering to the law, order and retribution electorate, but has tuned down such rhetoric lest it might get him in trouble with his new social-democratic pals in Europe. Now he just wants to overturn or revise most of the reforms (tax reform, social reform, pension reform) adopted in the last few years.
Back in the 1990 he was the most popular politician of the Party of the Democratic Left, a reformed communist party that was part of the coalition government in 1998-2002. He left the party and the government in 1999 and founded the SMER party when the governing coalition wasn’t able to satisfy his ambitions. Last year he graciously and undoubtedly with much gusto let the now miniscule and dying Party of the Democratic Left and various other small parties (the social democrats, for example, whose name he adopted along with their international membership) merge and dissolve in his own Party.
Ambition really seems to be his main driving force. That’s probably the only thing one can hope for. If, heaven forbid, he should really win and form some sort of coalition government, one can hope that just the satisfaction of finally becoming a PM is going to calm his leftist tastes and make him reasonably pragmatic in governmental affairs. And given the motley crew of various "experts" and apparatchiks that forms his party, with their own diverging interests; he will find it hard enough just to hold them all together. But still, I wouldn’t bet on it.
Jozef Ševc and the communist orthodoxy
If there is another small thing one can say in favour of Robert Fico, then it’s the fact that his radical leftist rhetoric may drive these jokers out of the parliament. The Communist party of Slovakia are living walking fossils of the mind, intellectually stuck in the 1980s. These guys are hard-line unreformed communists whose complete lack of sanity is balanced only by their complete lack of political prowess. They managed to squeeze into parliament in 2002 thanks to protest voters who voted for the name and who might now gravitate more toward Robert Fico. The communist leader, Josef Ševc is noted for his complete lack of charisma and for the fact that he is the son-in-law of a prominent communist regime politician – Vasil Bilak, one of the good folks that invited Soviet tanks to "normalize" the political situation in Czechoslovakia back in 1968. I can’t think of anything else to say about them, they are a borderline case of the bad and the pathetic.Ivan Saktor: All your Trade Unions are belong to me
What can I say? Being a Trade Union leader is bad enough. This guy is the president of the Confederation of the Trade Unions; he is, so to speak, the capo di tuti capi, the leader of the union leaders. And he signed an agreement with Robert Fico making the Trade Unions a de facto political campaign tool for the opposition party SMER. He has thrown away any semblance of independence that he used to shroud himself and the unions in to when he tried to push forward his outdated vision of a social model based on "modern European democracies" – like Germany, Sweden or France, where it works oh, so well, apparently. Though the numbers of union membership have continued to decline sharply during his presidency, he wasn’t spared the illusion of grandeur. He continued decrying the "rightwing inhumanities" and "wild capitalism" of the current Slovak government as if he spoke for the working masses, when actually he defended only the interests of the union leaders, who would have much less power and influence in a free reformed economy. His interests, beliefs and rhetoric thus made him a natural ally to Robert Fico.Well I hope I haven’t forgotten anyone. Soon there will be more loonies in the ugly bin and then we shall treat the "good" ones (knowing fair well that "good politician" is an oxymoron).
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