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Zuzana Čaputová, the new Slovakian president-elect, and her campaign slogan, which reads: “Let's face this evil, together.”
Nigel Farage, English Brexiteer and sometime associate of Donald J. Trump, called it a “populist tsunami:” A surge sweeping the Western world, from Trump in America, to Brexit in the U.K., Salvini in Italy, and far-right gains in most European parliaments.
But on March 30, in the small central European country of Slovakia, there is evidence of the tide turning with the election of progressive liberal Zuzana Čaputová as the country’s president. She will become, when she takes office in June, Slovakia’s first woman president.
The populist wave has at times seemed unstoppable, with gains in almost every Western country. Brexit’s repercussions will be felt in the U.K. for a generation at least. Viktor Orbán has secured the levers of power in Hungary, his two-thirds majority enabling him to change the constitution and strengthen his grip over the press and the judiciary. The populist Five Star Movement in Italy won an election on a promise of direct e-democracy, and now share power with the anti-immigration Lega Nord. Even Steve Bannon has turned up to unify the continent’s nationalist elements.
What all these movements have in common—in fact, what links all populist movements—is not a political ideology. Rather, it’s the ability of its proponents to establish a narrative of “the people” who only a populist leader can speak for, and an “establishment elite” to rail against. It is by its very nature anti-pluralist, with its focus on nativism and “looking after your own.”
The election of a progressive liberal woman in a deeply conservative central European state is therefore as surprising as it is welcome to the progressive movement. So who is Zuzana Čaputová and how did she win?
Dismissed as an “unknown girl” by the Speaker of Slovakia’s parliament, Zuzana Čaputová was a relative novice when she entered politics around a year ago as one of the founding members of the new Progressive Slovakia party.
Dismissed as an “unknown girl” by the Speaker of Slovakia’s parliament, Zuzana Čaputová was a relative novice when she entered politics around a year ago.
But Čaputová is an experienced lawyer with an impressive record fighting against corruption and for environmental concerns. She worked for the NGO Via Iuris from 2000 to 2017, promoting green issues and leading the movement to scrap parliamentary amnesties that were protecting the corrupt former Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar and his associates.
In 2016, in the final months of the Obama Administration, Čaputová was invited to Washington, D.C., by then-U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell after winning the prestigious Goldman Prize for grassroots environmental activism for her fourteen-year fight against landfill pollution in her hometown of Pezinok.
Čaputová’s presidential campaign started slowly. Two months before the election, opinion polls put her in fourth place with less than 10 percent support. But then, in February, fellow progressive Robert Mistrik withdrew from the presidential race in favor of Čaputová.
In televised TV debates she proved to be an excellent, charismatic debater. Soft spoken, yet firm and assured, she was able to shape the tone and the agenda of the campaign from then on.
Čaputová refused to sling mud at her opponents, despite being the target of it for much of the time. She had to battle misinformation and fake news spread through social media, including the now seemingly obligatory “funded by Soros” conspiracy theories. The values she projected—dignity, integrity and honesty—struck a chord with the electorate.
Her liberal views were predictably used against her. Slovakia is still a socially conservative country, and LGBT rights and a woman’s right to choose are not vote-winners. But the honesty of her responses won her respect even by those who take different positions.
“To me her progressive, liberal agenda was not her strongest card,” Gabriel Šipoš, director of Transparency International Slovakia, told me in a recent interview. “She was not really elected as a liberal progressive candidate. Many opposition politicians may share her liberal views, but they would never say these things openly. Politicians have been calculating in the past. Čaputová’s openness was refreshing.”
The strength of Čaputová’s appeal to decency needs to be seen in the context of last year’s murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his partner Martina Kušnírová, which shook Slovakia to its core. The youth-led grassroots movement “For a Decent Slovakia,” brought the biggest street protests seen in Slovakia since the fall of the Communist regime in the 1990s, leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Robert Fico.
A few days before the first round of voting in the presidential election, Slovakian authorities charged millionaire Marian Kočner with ordering the murders. The story Kuciak was working on at the time of his death exposed Kočner’s alleged tax fraud and links between Italian organised crime, Slovak businessmen and members of the Slovak government.
Two or three hours after presidential victory was officially confirmed, Čaputová paid a quiet visit to the Kuciak memorial on Bratislava’s main square to light a candle. Her campaign slogan, “Let’s face this evil together!” offered a clear choice between the old corrupt Slovakia and a fresher more progressive state, untainted by scandal.
But does Čaputová’s victory signal a sea change for more of Europe, the tide turning in favor of the progressives against the forces of nationalism and populism?
The short answer is no.
While Čaputová’s win will certainly give encouragement to opposition parties, particularly in the other Visegrad Four countries of Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, societies in central Europe remain deeply divided along progressive/populist lines. And while the progressives won this one, nationalist, populist movements have had the upper hand in recent contests. Society is split virtually 50/50.
Claiming third and fourth place in the first round of the Slovakian election were two candidates from the far right.
Claiming third and fourth place in the first round of the Slovakian election were two candidates from the far right. Štefan Harabin has spoken out against Muslims, homosexuals, NATO, the European Union and anything else likely to trigger a response from his base, and Marian Kotleba is a bona fide neo-Nazi who leads a group of actual Blackshirts. Between them, they represented 25 percent of the vote, and if one of them had stood aside, then the other would certainly have made it into the run-off.
“It seems like Slovakia is very much changed,” says Šipoš of Transparency International. “But if you look at the opinion polls, there is still a huge amount of frustration from people who believe in conspiracies, who don’t believe in democracy that much anymore, and that’s still a huge challenge.”
And conditions in Slovakia were ripe for a Čaputová victory. The ruling SMER party is deeply embroiled in corruption. In addition, Slovakia has not tilted toward illiberalism as far as some of its neighbours. The SMER regime has not centralised control of state institutions, as has happened in Hungary and Poland. And both the judiciary and the press have remained largely independent and free.
According to Csaba Tóth, of the liberal think-tank Republikon, “It’s not that Čaputová created this moment. It’s that she was able to unite a liberal, pro-Western constituency. It could go either way at any future election.”
So, although Čaputová’s election doesn’t indicate the sea change that some are looking for, it does serve as an inspirational symbol for progressive movements in neighbouring countries.“It shows the other countries that this is possible,” says Tóth. “Many people seem to have forgotten that Central European countries have a very liberal, cosmopolitan, pro-Western side. It’s a reminder that there is a very strong constituency for this type of politics.”