Slovak and Czech politics

Fresh air

A political earthquake in central Europe brings new faces and high hopes

BRATISLAVA AND PRAGUE

Easy, tigress

AFTER years of sleaze and stagnation central European politics is livening up. In April the centre-right gained a thumping majority in Hungary. At the end of May Czech voters, spurred by an anti-corruption campaign, shunned the two main parties for newcomers. And now Slovaks have evicted the country’s most effective politician, the populist and nationalist prime minister Robert Fico, in favour of a bunch of free-market parties preaching lean government and ethnic harmony.

Iveta Radicova (pictured), head of the centre-right Christian Democrats (SDKU-DS), is set to form a government backed by 79 of the 150 parliamentary deputies. The sociology professor, nicknamed the “Tatra Tigress”, will be Slovakia’s first woman prime minister (and one of a mere handful of prominent female politicians in the region). Her party won only 28 seats; it has a chance of power thanks to the collapse of Mr Fico’s coalition partners and a surge in support for two newcomers.

Slovakia’s political landscape has changed. The party of Vladimir Meciar, an authoritarian ex-prime minister who isolated Slovakia from Europe in the 1990s, failed to pass the 5% threshold needed to enter parliament. It is now likely to fold. The racist Slovak National Party squeaked in. Its loudmouth leader, Jan Slota, said he was “crying”. Both parties were Mr Fico’s allies. He pandered to their voters during the election campaign, to some effect: his nominally centre-left party’s share of the vote rose by 6%, gaining it 62 seats. It polled strongly among poorer and provincial voters. But flirting with the fringe made Mr Fico a pariah in the eyes of more mainstream potential partners.

These include the new Most-Hid (from the Slovak and Hungarian words for “bridge”), run by Bela Bugar, who used to run another well-rooted Hungarian ethnic party. The old outfit did not meet the 5% threshold, whereas the new lot, which aims to cross the ethnic divide, gained a surprising 8%. Most-Hid’s success seems to have stunned the new government in Budapest, which bet heavily on its defeated rival. The other newcomer, Freedom and Solidarity (known as SaS), did far better than expected, polling 12%. It is run by Richard Sulik, a zealous economic liberal who brought the flat tax to Slovakia in its free-market glory days. SaS fought the election using social-networking and messaging websites, chiefly Facebook and Twitter.

The new four-party Slovak coalition (it also includes a small Christian-Democrat party) will have two big tasks. One is to fix the public finances. Slovakia’s deficit has risen to 6.8% of GDP, following an economic contraction of 4.7% last year. The other is to mend relations with Hungary, plagued by rows over language and loyalty. Ms Radicova wants to scrap a new law that strips Slovaks of their passports if they take dual Hungarian citizenship. (She also opposes Slovakia’s contribution to the euro-zone bail-out fund.)

The Slovak result echoes that of the Czech election two weeks earlier, where anti-corruption campaigns swung votes behind new parties, which did well in Prague and among younger voters. Two of them—TOP 09, led by Karel Schwarzenberg, a Habsburg-tinged aristocrat and former foreign minister, and the more populist Public Matters—are in coalition talks with the centre-right Civic Democrats.

Public finances are a worry in the Czech Republic too (fears of the “road to Greece” played prominently in the election campaign). The coalition parties want to start working on a new budget as soon as the government has been agreed on, probably on July 7th. The country has promised the European Union to get the deficit below 3% of GDP by 2013, from 5.3% this year. The government should hold 118 of the 200 seats in the lower house, making it a bit more secure than its Slovak counterpart when it faces tough fiscal decisions.

It will have a harder job meeting voters’ expectations of cleaner politics. A campaign called “Replace the Politicians”, run by a group of apolitical but public-spirited marketing experts, helped focus voters’ wrath on some of the worst offenders, who found themselves voted off party lists. But the problems go deep. A cosy cartel between the old parties has brought worrying overlaps between business and politics, the stench of dirty money from the east and a stream of scandals involving the courts, police and spooks. Mr Schwarzenberg describes corruption as a “cancer” that threatens to turn the country into “Sicily, minus the sea and oranges”. But as Italians know, moaning about corruption is one thing. Eradicating it is quite another.