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

Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. He tweets at @DaliborRohac.

When Slovakia heads to the polls to elect its new president on April 6, it will be grappling with a paradox.

Objectively speaking, the election’s stakes aren’t high, as the Slovak president is a largely ceremonial figure. Moreover, neither of the two candidates in the runoff are particularly divisive or controversial: There’s Peter Pellegrini — the suave parliamentary speaker and former prime minister who is backed by the governing coalition. Then, there’s Ivan Korčok — the former foreign minister and a diplomat who served under a plethora of governments, including Pellegrini’s.

And yet, the election comes at a febrile political moment: Slovakia appears evenly split between a pro-Western camp that’s alarmed by Russia’s aggression, and a reactionary one that’s suspicious of the West and attuned to the Kremlin’s talking points. And it is this divide that will determine Saturday’s outcome.

While political leaders, parties and specific policy issues come and go, some version of this East-West divide has always been present in Slovakia.

In 1998, for example, 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 called Slovakia the “black hole” of Europe. Then, in early 2018, Slovaks took to the streets after the murder of journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová, ousting Mečiar’s political and ideological successor Robert Fico.

But last October, Fico returned to power, embittered and radicalized by what he called an “attempt to overturn a democratic election,” instigated by philanthropist George Soros and the U.S. Embassy in Bratislava. Since then, the Slovak government has strongly veered toward Russia and ended its aid to Ukraine. Fico has also abolished a special prosecutor’s office, which pursues corruption-related cases, and he’s tried to shorten the statute of limitations on a range of crimes — seemingly to protect himself and his inner circle from ongoing investigations.

Slovakia’s urban pro-Western segment has responded to all this with mass protests, and incumbent President Zuzana Čaputová challenged the criminal code reforms in the country’s Constitutional Court. Meanwhile, the governing coalition has also been trying to end the autonomous legal status of the country’s public television and radio, turning public broadcasting into a subsidiary of the government.

All of this should serve as a powerful mobilizing force for Slovakia’s opposition, which has already come together behind Korčok. And in the first round, Korčok won with a healthy margin of 5.5 percent. In the run-off, however, the race promises to be tight, as Korčok has little hope of attracting the third-party vote, which is currently clustered around Štefan Harabin — an antiestablishment and openly pro-Kremlin candidate, who received almost 12 percent of the vote.

A serial presidential candidate and conspiracy monger, Harabin is a figure of ridicule, but his base is real. And mobilizing even a modest fraction of his electorate could be enough to end Korčok’s presidential ambitions.

Moreover, Korčok has been struggling to garner support among Slovak Hungarians — a key constituency that’s been increasingly falling under the influence of reactionary political forces with both formal and informal connections to Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party.

All in all, there’s a real contrast between this year’s nail-biter of a race and the firm lead Čaputová enjoyed ahead of the run-off in 2019. To be sure, Korčok’s campaign is competent and tightly run, and given Russia’s imperialism, the question of whether Slovakia might become the next Hungary has become much more urgent than when similar fears were raised five years ago. In fact, as it turns out, when Pellegrini was prime minister, he had pleaded with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to help him secure high-level meetings in Moscow ahead of the 2020 parliamentary election.

Korčok’s headwinds are no less real, however. As parts of Fico’s criminal justice reform have been signed into law and others await litigation, the outrage that mobilized the opposition earlier this year has started to dissipate. And compared to bland technocrat European Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič in 2019, this time around the government’s candidate — the mellifluous and charming Pellegrini — is far more appealing.

Slovakia’s a small country where relatively minute mood swings among key constituencies can produce large electoral effects. And a divided government would be a far safer bet for Slovakia’s constitutional order — as well as its place in the Western alliance — than seeing a pliant loyalist of the ruling coalition ascend to the top political office.

The question is, has Korčok made this argument with sufficient urgency to voters who don’t want to see Bratislava turn into the next Budapest, while also presenting himself as non-threatening to those who want the exact opposite? Here’s hoping.