Richard Golian

Richard Golian
Castellano

Political situation in Slovakia

By Richard Golian17.1.2020 (last updated) The original post was from March 2018. Castellano Français

Which political parties are the most important ones? And what are the connections between them? I will try to answer these questions.

AKO poll (January 2020)

In the diagram above you can see the current state of the party spectrum. Easy to understand? No? Well, I will explain a little bit. We can say that there are two groups of main political parties.

One group is placed on the left. It is not a coincidence. In that part of the diagram, you can find "social democratic" political parties, though there are also nationalists. (SMER-SD: "social democratic" and conservative, it sounds like a schizophrenic position, but everything is possible in Slovakia; SNS: nationalist). These two parties form a coalition together with the Slovak-Hungarian party Most-Híd (the name would translate as “bridge” in both of the languages respectively).

The second group of political parties is placed on the right. Those parties are both conservative and liberal. (SAS: liberal; OĽaNO: has both liberal and conservative fraction; KDH: Christian democrats; ZA ĽUDÍ: a new centrist party led by former president Andrej Kiska; there are also new liberal parties SPOLU OD and PS similar to En Marche! or Ciudadanos). SAS, OĽaNO, KDH, ZA ĽUDÍ and PS-SPOLU form the so-called “democratic opposition”. All of these parties tend to cooperate at the regional level as well.

Like in other countries, there is a new group of anti-establishment parties emerging. These are becoming a phenomenon and have been quite successful. In the case of Slovakia, I should mention “Sme Rodina” (We are a Family) and mainly “ĽS Naše Slovensko” (People's Party Our Slovakia). There are examples of cooperation between the democratic opposition and “Sme Rodina”, however, ĽS Naše Slovensko is never being approached by the opposition.

Well, that is it for now. I hope the post is easy to understand even for foreigners and possibly might help you get some insight into the Slovak party system.