SLOVAKIA’S POPULIST government faces a fight for survival in Saturday’s general election after a divisive campaign dominated by a row with neighbouring Hungary, criticism of a nationalist party’s anti-Roma rhetoric and a spate of devastating floods.
The left-wing Smer party of prime minister Robert Fico is expected to comfortably win the ballot but to struggle to secure a majority in parliament, if surveys predicting a poor showing for its coalition partners prove accurate.
Polls suggest Smer will take about 35 per cent of votes, but that the far-right Slovak National Party (SNS) and the HZDS party of authoritarian former prime minister Vladimir Meciar could struggle to gain the 5 per cent needed to enter parliament.
The centre-right SDKU is forecast to come second, with about 14 per cent of votes, ahead of the Christian Democrats (KDH), the Freedom and Solidarity party and two groups representing Slovakia’s Hungarian minority, which constitutes about 10 per cent of its 5.4 million population.
Some polls suggest those five parties could form a majority if they joined forces, while others predicted that parliament would be split down the middle between rival alliances.
The SDKU and the KDH say they will not form a coalition with Smer, and the ethnic Hungarian parties would find it all but impossible to work with the SNS, whose leader is best known for his virulently anti-Hungarian and anti-Roma outbursts.
The Hungarians may also now be unable to work with Mr Fico, who has spent much of the campaign castigating Budapest’s new government for introducing a law to make it easier for ethnic Hungarians living abroad to gain citizenship.
Mr Fico has called the law a threat to Slovakia’s national security and branded Hungary an “extremist country which exports its brown plague”, an apparent reference to wartime fascism in Hungary and to the far-right Jobbik party’s strong third-place showing in April’s general election.
He has proposed a countermeasure which would strip anyone applying for a Hungarian passport of their Slovak citizenship, stoking ethnic tension that was stirred up last autumn when Slovakia banned the use of the Hungarian language in public offices and institutions.
Mr Fico and Smer have been criticised for using increasingly right-wing rhetoric and fuelling animosity towards the Hungarians and Slovakia’s Roma community who – as in Hungary – are often accused of living off state benefits and the proceeds of petty crime.
The SNS was upbraided by human rights groups for using campaign posters showing a dark-skinned, tattooed man wearing a gold chain, accompanied by the slogan: “Do not feed those who do not want to work.”
Party officials insisted the campaign was not racist and that the man featured was not necessarily Roma, but the posters highlighted the widespread prejudice towards Gypsies in Slovakia, where they make up about 10 per cent of the population.
Mr Fico said recently that Roma children should be taught in boarding schools away from their families, to help break the cycle of illiteracy, ill health, unemployment and poverty that blights their community.
Slovakia is expected to return to modest economic growth this year after slumping in 2009, but opposition parties say Mr Fico’s populist spending sprees and his alleged tolerance of corruption and incompetence among loyal officials is hampering the country’s recovery.
The government has been rocked by a series of scandals, including the case of live explosives being sent accidentally on a passenger flight to Dublin in January.
