The result of the election in Slovakia, held Sunday, has major ramifications well beyond the country’s borders and points to what is likely to happen over the next year or so in elections and referendums elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe. There was only one issue in the Slovak contest: joining the outside world — specifically joining NATO and the EU. Like its neighbors, Slovakia has wanted to join both; it would be proof that the communist era is past history and that it is a full-fledged member of Europe and the West. But Europe and the West kept Slovakia at bay for the five years after Slovakia split from the Czech lands in 1993, because of the authoritarian rule of its then Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar and his arch-nationalist HZDS party. It was only when a coalition of liberals, centrists, left-wingers and ethnic Hungarians beat him in the 1998 election, that the EU and NATO put Slovakia’s applications on the front burner.
The problem, however, although the center-right under the prime ministership of Mikulas Dzurinda has reformed the economy, the results have not been easy for the public: Slovaks are worse off now than under Meciar: privatization and the closure of unprofitable state enterprises have created the highest unemployment rate in Europe, now around 20 percent. The result has been a mood swing against reform and the government. As in Germany, where only a few weeks ago it was a forgone conclusion that Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder would lose and the conservative opposition would win, so too in Slovakia, the expectation a short time ago was that the governing coalition would lose and the Meciar opposition would win.
That it has not happened has to be seen as a great victory for NATO and EU. For months, the two have told the Slovaks in the bluntest of terms that were they to vote for Meciar, the doors to membership of the two organizations would be slammed shut in their face. None was more blunt than NATO Secretary-General George Robertson. During a visit to Slovakia last March he publicly declared that while he was not telling them how they should vote, “if the people in Slovakia want to be in NATO, they must vote for those parties that will take them into NATO”.
Much as they feel threatened by their government’s reforms, much as they dislike the coalition’s squabbling and divisions, they have heeded the ultimatum, the first ever made to an electorate by NATO and the EU. They have re-elected the coalition and rejected Meciar’s HZDS. They have decided that uncomfortable though reform is, staying outside the EU will be even more precarious and outside NATO more dangerous.
The likelihood is that the same will happen when other Central and East European countries are asked to vote on EU membership. At the moment, there is much talk of an anti-EU tide sweeping across Poland and to a lesser extent Hungary and that, come the referendums there, membership will be rejected. Slovakia’s election result argues against that. Reluctantly, certainly with trepidation and fear as to the future, the Slovaks have voted to embrace the outside world in the form of the EU and NATO; the rest of Central and Eastern Europe, when faced with the choice in regard to the EU, will do the same.
