Source BNE Intelliwire
When bne IntelliNews was founded in 2006 it tried to fill a gap in the market for dedicated and informed business and political news and analysis of the whole post-communist world from Prague to Ulaanbaatar. For the past 17 years we have continued to focus on this region, which is badly neglected by other media, while adding coverage of other emerging market regions, namely Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia, and adding specialist energy reporting (Newsbase).
This means we cover small countries such as Slovakia, population five million, on a daily basis and when they hold a general election, which takes place today, we take it seriously. We sent two reporters there beforehand to find out what is going on and to write a series of articles to explain to readers why it is important not just to Slovaks but to the rest of Europe and beyond.
This election, other media have also belatedly discovered Slovakia and a few have even sent reporters too. There is widespread interest in the threats of Robert Fico, the country’s dominant politician for the past two decades, to end Slovak military aid for Ukraine and to oppose further sanctions on Russia.
This risk may be overblown. We are optimistic that the liberal Progressive Slovakia of Michal Simecka (pictured) may be able to form a coalition to keep Fico’s Smer party from returning to power. It is also likely that if Fico were to be victorious, his government would not be as bad as his opponents are painting. Fico would probably be in a coalition with the more moderate Hlas party, and Slovakia’s stuttering economy needs EU funds desperately, so he would be unlikely to pick a fight with Brussels.
Going to war with the European Commission is also not Fico’s style, and in any case Slovakia is a smaller and less self-important country than either Hungary or Poland, so it tends to try to stick to the European mainstream. On the other hand, though, Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski could give him the cover and courage to be more obstreperous this time around.
But it is another thing to say that the election is irrelevant. Politico wrote a piece this week saying that Slovakia was a “backwater”, that its election “doesn’t really matter”, it was “much ado about nothing”, and that media commentators were in a “pearl clutching mode”. It said we all could soon “go back to not caring about Slovak politics”.
Among other flippant and patronising comments, it wrote:
“If Slovakia, a country of about 5.5 million people, matters so much, then why do so many people (including Silvio Berlusconi and George W. Bush) confuse it with Slovenia?”
And:
“That Europe is only waking up to Fico’s political comeback (which has been apparent for months) a few days before the election is a pretty good indication of its relevance.”
Bne IntelliNews is still clearly needed to provide intelligent and perceptive coverage of this region, which continues to be neglected by other media, even some that purport to cover the whole of Europe.
Robert Anderson, Managing Editor
I find this article comforting but don’t know how realistic it is. I guess time will tell.
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Europe has expanded too quickly with people who have forgotten the original project and who do not have enough standards for themselves. of course no element is safe from regression… this is why, for example, we must not compromise with people like Duda who do not have enough democratic demands towards themselves and do not respect not enough of the philosophy of Europe. he has already blackmailed the EU with Orban, for example. the EU which also has internal defense agreements, which presupposes a minimum common vision and values. we are still not going to be led by negligence and successive inconsistencies to stand in solidarity with fascists.
Europe is like Wikipedia, it’s a great human project 🙂
it is a machine for producing tolerance and prosperity.
it is a machine for producing tolerance security and prosperity.
with the EU birds fly more better and flowers smell better…
maybe we will even be able to save the bees! 😉
As the EU is propagating tolerance, it is showing very high level of intolerance towards some of Poland’s needs. And, Poland (and others of the former Warsaw Pact) have warned the major EU members numerous times of mafia land’s aggressive tendencies, and were duly ignored. Maybe the EU should back up and regroup to take a look at itself from a distance, like a woman looking at herself in a mirror, to see if there is something else it can do to assure a better unity.