Slovakia’s presidential runoff is a contest between the West and Russia – POLITICO

And but, the election comes at a febrile political second: Slovakia seems evenly cut up between a pro-Western camp that’s alarmed by Russia’s aggression, and a reactionary one which’s suspicious of the West and attuned to the Kremlin’s speaking factors. And it’s this divide that may decide Saturday’s end result.

Whereas political leaders, events and particular coverage points come and go, some model of this East-West divide has all the time been current in Slovakia.

In 1998, for instance, then-budding authoritarian Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar was voted out in an election seen to be existential, after U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had referred to as Slovakia the “black gap” of Europe. Then, in early 2018, Slovaks took to the streets after the homicide of journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová, ousting Mečiar’s political and ideological successor Robert Fico.

However final October, Fico returned to energy, embittered and radicalized by what he referred to as an “try and overturn a democratic election,” instigated by philanthropist George Soros and the U.S. Embassy in Bratislava. Since then, the Slovak authorities has strongly veered towards Russia and ended its help to Ukraine. Fico has additionally abolished a particular prosecutor’s workplace, which pursues corruption-related circumstances, and he’s tried to shorten the statute of limitations on a variety of crimes — seemingly to guard himself and his inside circle from ongoing investigations.

Slovakia’s city pro-Western phase has responded to all this with mass protests, and incumbent President Zuzana Čaputová challenged the prison code reforms within the nation’s Constitutional Court docket. In the meantime, the governing coalition has additionally been making an attempt to finish the autonomous authorized standing of the nation’s public tv and radio, turning public broadcasting right into a subsidiary of the federal government.

All of this could function a strong mobilizing drive for Slovakia’s opposition, which has already come collectively behind Korčok. And within the first spherical, Korčok received with a wholesome margin of 5.5 p.c. Within the run-off, nonetheless, the race guarantees to be tight, as Korčok has little hope of attracting the third-party vote, which is at present clustered round Štefan Harabin — an antiestablishment and overtly pro-Kremlin candidate, who acquired virtually 12 p.c of the vote.