By Michaela Terenzani
Michaela Terenzani is head of the foreign news desk at the SME daily in Slovakia and former editor-in-chief of The Slovak Spectator, where she still comments on Slovak politics in her weekly newsletter.
Peter Pellegrini won the presidential election in Slovakia last weekend with 53 percent of the vote. Pellegrini, who ran against former diplomat Ivan Korčok as the candidate of the ruling coalition led by Robert Fico, entered the race as the absolute favorite – for months before the campaign even started, Fico’s political ally of many years was already polling as the most likely potential candidate for the top constitutional post. The first round of the election two weeks ago changed that dynamic since Korčok emerged first then.
As we understand now, it may have helped mobilize the part of the electorate that did not vote for Pellegrini at first but was absolutely opposed to Korčok.
The part of the electorate in question is mainly composed of people who have for years been mobilized by far-right and anti-system politicians via emotions of fear and hate. That is precisely what this election campaign turned out to be largely about: spreading fear, despite the fact that the Pellegrini campaign mainly worked with the slogan of “peace”. The word, however, has been filled with too many meanings by now in Slovakia, where people harbor a sincere desire for a time without political excesses and everyday conflicts, issues that the previous government led by Igor Matovic were infamous for. The desire for peace also represents a hope that the conflict in neighboring Ukraine will not spill over across the Slovak border. But the word peace is also a dog whistle that stands for everything the pro-Kremlin propaganda claims about the war in Ukraine – like the calls to stop the military aid or to scrap the sanctions against the aggressor.
Pellegrini has had the image of a rather moderate politician, but his presidential campaign made good use of these messages, particularly ahead of the second round, when the onetime prime minister faced Korčok – a proponent of Slovakia’s pro-Western orientation who insists that the defenders of Ukraine are fighting not just for their own country but for the rest of Europe too. For this, Korčok was labelled a warmonger and a puppet in the hands of some foreign powers.
In the last days of the campaign, Pellegrini’s political allies succeeded in spreading the claim that Korčok would “send your sons to fight in Ukraine” – an outright lie not just because Korčok categorically denied it but mainly because the president, even though the formal commander in chief of the armed forces, does not possess the power to deploy the armed forces to Ukraine or anywhere else.
There was little reason to expect that this unfair campaign would not work on the Slovak electorate, which has been all too familiar with – and sympathetic to – messages like this for years. In the long run, polls have been showing a dangerous decline of the standards of public opinion and an increase in susceptibility to disinformation. Last year’s Globsec Trends poll, for instance, has shown that while 54 percent of those polled in Slovakia perceived Russia as a threat, nearly as many saw a threat in the US. Only 40 percent blamed Russia for the war in Ukraine, 37 percent blamed the West while 17 percent blamed Ukraine. Robert Fico and other politicians have been feeding these sentiments in the past four years in order to win back the power that Fico lost in 2020.
This is a technique that neither Fico nor anyone else in Slovakia has invented or even just innovated upon. The “war candidate vs. peace candidate” narrative that does not shy away from using lies has been successfully deployed by Viktor Orbán during the 2022 election campaign in Hungary. Offering such a playbook was not the only way that the Hungarian government has been helpful in the Slovak election. The government-controlled Hungarian Television (MTV) repeatedly aired an interview with Pellegrini during the last two days before the run-off when moratorium applied on any campaign in Slovakia. The television is broadly accessible and widely watched by members of the numerous Hungarian minority in southern Slovakia (more than 420,000 people in the population of 5.4 million said they were of Hungarian ethnicity during the 2021 census). Pellegrini was thus given the exclusive chance to make promises directly to these voters.
The Hungarian vote was seen as one of the key factors in the election, and Pellegrini eventually prevailed among the Hungarian population of Slovakia.
The 48-year-old President-elect Pellegrini is no political greenhorn. He has been on the scene for more than two decades, most of that as a loyal member of the Smer party of Robert Fico. He served as an MP and a government minister. Once he is inaugurated, he will have been the only person in the state so far who has held all three top constitutional posts – speaker of Parliament, prime minister, president.
Fico, the self-identified political maker of Pellegrini, does not see eye to eye with him: Pellegrini deserted Smer with a dozen fellow renegades in 2020 to found the Hlas party. Before long, they ascended to the first place in public opinion polls and Pellegrini was seen as a strong candidate for prime minister ahead of the parliamentary election in 2023 – until Fico’s Smer managed to recover from Fico’s fall five years before and win the election, among other things, with a previous “war vs. peace” campaign.
For a few days, Pellegrini, whose Hlas came third in the elections behind the Progressive Slovakia party, enjoyed the position of the kingmaker. In the end, he discarded his prime-ministerial ambitions and joined the ruling coalition formed by Fico together with another junior coalition partner, the far-right SNS. Even though he now claims that he chose to run for president because he felt in his heart the support of the people, the background information from coalition talks in October 2023 suggests the coalition’s support for his presidential bid was part of the informal coalition deals.
Pellegrini’s presidency was part of the plan all along and as president, he is most unlikely to stop Fico from taking Slovakia down the Hungarian path.
In the six months that they have been in power, the coalition of Smer, Hlas, and SNS pushed through a controversial change to the Penal Code that reduces penalties particularly for economic crimes and that according to observers would in effect mean an amnesty for many of the dozens of people linked to former Smer governments who currently face charges or indictments on suspicions of high-level corruption. The change is currently suspended, pending a decision by the Constitutional Court. They scrapped the Special Prosecutor’s Office which was created to deal with the most serious crimes, including corruption. They proposed a thorough revamping of the public-service broadcaster that would result in the dismissal of its current director and bringing it under the government’s control. They proposed a law that would label NGOs as entities of foreign influence. Sounds familiar?
Moreover, not unlike in Hungary, the government is now directly involved in spreading disinformation in the country.
Robert Fico and other ministers of his government treat the disinformation outlets as legitimate channels to communicate with their voters, calling them “alternative media” or “citizens’ media”. All the while, they turn the critical press into one of their main enemies.
Ivan Korčok, who ran as an independent candidate with the support of the pro-Western opposition parties ranging from Progressives to Christian Democrats, ran on the notion that the Fico-led ruling coalition should not control all key positions in the state. Korčok promised to speak up when the government takes further problematic steps to get the state under their control. The disappointment among Korčok’s supporters that he will not be able to do that from the Presidential Palace is understandable, but in reality, the president has very limited options to hinder the steamroller that Fico has set in motion – let alone stop it.
Yet the disappointment goes much deeper; people who fear that liberal democracy is under attack by the government of Robert Fico feel disappointed that so many of their fellow citizens responded affirmatively to a campaign based on hate and outright lies.
“Perhaps the West will punish us for electing Peter Pellegrini,” Robert Fico said in his post-election video address on Facebook, his preferred tool of communication with the public, in yet another display of his antagonizing attitudes towards Slovakia’s EU and NATO allies. By doing so, he has also signaled where he sees his government on the international scene. Pellegrini’s victory is also the victory of Robert Fico, Viktor Orbán, and the Kremlin.
