Marian Kotleba (LSNS) during an extraordinary session of the National Council of the Slovak Republic on 24 May 2018 in Bratislava. PHOTO TASR — Marko Erd Slovakia’s Far-Right ĽSNS Party: Saved by Its Perceived IrrelevanceMichaela Terenzani and Roman CuprikBratislavaBIRNAugust 24, 202206:56 Slovakia’s prosecutor general has announced that, contrary to expectations, he won’t try to dissolve Marian Kotleba’s party, arguing it’s not a serious threat to democracy. Some think that view is too sanguine.
Twenty years ago, Marian Kotleba would march on the streets of Slovak towns with his comrades from the party with an archaic-sounding name, Slovenská Pospolitosť (Slovak Togetherness), wearing fascist-style uniforms reminiscent of those worn by the Hlinka Guards, the militia of Slovakia’s wartime Nazi puppet state.
Before long, he became the leader of this racist party which based its programme on, among other things, the claim that parliamentary democracy had failed.
“Jews only live on our territory because Slovaks are merciful enough to let them, even though they despise everything that is Slovak, national and Christian,” Kotleba stated in one of his speeches in 2005.
Neither Kotleba nor Slovak Togetherness was a stranger to such rhetoric, yet the party never amounted to anything more than a marginal political force. It never came close to reaching 3 per cent of the vote in any parliamentary election, the limit parties need to exceed to be eligible for financial support from the state, not to mention the 5 per cent threshold to actually enter the parliament.
Eventually, the Supreme Court dissolved the party in 2006 because its programme violated the universal right to vote.
But that did not prevent Kotleba from continuing his political activities. He donned a suit instead of the fascist-style uniform he used to wear, and went on to found a new party, People’s Party Our Slovakia (ĽSNS). As its leader, he was elected the governor of the central-Slovak region of Banská Bystrica in 2013 and served the full four-year term. During his term, ĽSNS was elected to parliament in the 2016 election, then repeated the success in 2020, even though it faced an attempt by the state to dissolve it the year before.
Despite Kotleba’s history, political success and a recent Supreme Court verdict that found him guilty of expressing sympathy with extremist movements, Slovakia’s Prosecutor General Maroš Žilinka recently announced that, contrary to expectations, he would not be filing a motion to try to ban the far-right party again.
Explaining his decision on August 5, Žilinka argued that Kotleba’s party was no serious threat to democracy.
“The political party has no real potential and opportunity to implement political changes that pose a threat to democracy,” the Prosecutor General’s Office stated.
Archive photo of a Slovenská Pospolitosť march, with a young Kotleba speaking, on the anniversary of the Slovak National Uprising on 28 August 2005. The uprising was an anti-fascist resistance in 1944, though Pospolitosť used to call it the Bolshevik coup against the Slovak statehood. PHOTO TASR – Jozef Ïurník
Too weak to be an imminent threat
A court ban on ĽSNS has been an issue since the last attempt to have the party dissolved on the grounds of its anti-democratic character, based on a lawsuit filed by the previous prosecutor general, Jaromir Čižnár, in 2019.
The court dismissed that motion due to insufficient evidence, and Čižnár’s successor was expected to revisit the issue, especially after Kotleba was subsequently found guilty on extremism charges in 2020.
The country’s chief prosecutor is the only authority that can file a motion to dissolve a political party. The case goes before the newly-established Supreme Administrative Court (previously it was the role of the Supreme Court, which decided on the ĽSNS ban case in 2019).
When Žilinka ran for prosecutor general, he said during his campaign that he would consider revisiting the motion to dissolve ĽSNS. Yet after analysis by his office, he said he could not find any reason to do so.
Initially, the prosecutor general did not even regard it necessary to explain his arguments for not filing a motion to dissolve the party, but after persistent questioning by the media he published his reasoning on a single page of A4.
Žilinka stated that he took into account the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, as well as the judgement of the Supreme Court from 2019, when the first lawsuit to dissolve the party was rejected.
Since the 2019 attempt to dissolve the party, several ĽSNS representatives have been found guilty. On the other hand, the party has requested the Interior Ministry register new party bylaws that are fully in accordance with the principles of a democratic and legal state.
“The analysis allowed us to draw a clear conclusion that the ĽSNS does not have any real potential and opportunity to implement political changes threatening democracy, and therefore that there is no imminent risk to democracy,” Žilinka wrote in his statement.
He went on to argue that he considered the criteria such as the size of the party, the split in the party that led to the creation of another party Republika, the potential of ĽSNS to form a coalition with other parties, and the number of its MPs (currently seven in the 150-strong parliament). In 2020, ĽSNS was elected to parliament with nearly 8 per cent of the vote. Currently, it is polling at around 1.5 per cent.
Prosecutor General of the Slovak Republic Maro ilinka during the Constitutional Law Committee of the National Assembly of the Slovak Republic on the current situation at the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Slovak Republic on 28 June 2022 in Bratislava. PHOTO TASR – Martin Baumann
ĽSNS not the only threat
The drop in the party’s popularity among voters came after a number of prominent members, including five MPs and the MEP Milan Uhrik, broke away from ĽSNS and started their own movement, Republika. Polls indicate it has a chance to make the 5 per cent threshold needed to make it into parliament at the next election. In addition, there is another marginal movement, Život (Life), whose three MPs made it into parliament on the ĽSNS slate.
Život are considered ultra-conservative rather than fascist or far-right, says Tomáš Nociar, a political analyst who specialises in extremism. “Ideologically speaking, [Život] are not too distant from the far-right and therefore they do not mind cooperating with it, thus contributing to the so-called process of normalisation and mainstreaming of the far-right in society,” he explains.
This has also been done, to certain degrees, by many mainstream parties, including Smer, SaS, Sme Rodina and OĽaNO, who all have negotiated or voted together with extreme-right representatives in the past.
At the same time, Nociar stresses that extremist forces are not the only threat that democracy needs to be defended from. “Democracy has been constantly under attack, not only directly from agents outside of the democratic framework, but also indirectly from those who are inside of it, contributing to democratic erosion with phenomena like corruption or various types of inequalities, including economic inequality, that in turn creates political inequality and undermines citizens’ faith in democracy,” he says.
Nociar defines ĽSNS as “a neofascist, extreme-right party with more than a decade-old history that expresses not only nativist, authoritarian and populist politics, but also anti-democratic tendencies and a fascist legacy.”
Republika, on the other hand, has tried to soften its image associated with ĽSNS in order to gain more coalition potential, he notes. The party is doing this despite some of their faces being prominent ĽSNS politicians not so long ago, including the MP Milan Mazurek, who was previously vice-chair of ĽSNS and lost his mandate after he was found guilty of making racist remarks on the radio, using terms like “a whole community of gypsy antisocials”.
Pictured from left, Juraj Krúpa (OĽaNO), Marian Kotleba (ĽSNS) and Slovak Defence Minister Jaroslav Naď (OĽaNO) during the parliamentary debate on the Defence Cooperation Agreement with the US on 8 February 2022. PHOTO TASR – Jakub Kotian
Experts see no change
Grigorij Mesežnikov, a political analyst with the non-governmental think tank the Institute for Public Affairs, points to the guilty verdicts for ĽSNS politicians and their actions during the pandemic lockdowns as evidence that disproves Žilinka’s claim the party has become less radical.
“There are still the same people in the ĽSNS who formed this party and they still claim to be fighting against the system,” he says.
Nociar admits that the party’s ability to overturn democracy is objectively lower compared to a few years ago. Yet the ability to do so is just one part of the assessment; it also needs to be considered whether the party actually has such intentions. That is not an easy task with regard to ĽSNS, which doesn’t tend to discuss these aims openly.
“But it criticises the existing democracy in Slovakia, accuses it and its defence mechanisms of totalitarianism, and expresses sympathy towards the clerical-fascist ideology of the wartime Slovak state that is not compatible with democratic ideas and values,” Nociar say in support of his claim that ĽSNS has not undergone any substantial change in its core ideology since it was first established in 2010.
Addressing the argument that ĽSNS is too small or weak to pose a threat to democracy, Mesežnikov points to the example of Kotleba’s first party, the Slovak Togetherness. “After all, that party was completely marginal at the time, but it clearly had an unconstitutional programme and it was right that it was dissolved,” he says.
Marian Kotleba, chairman of L’SNS, arrives for a hearing in the case against him at the specialised criminal court in Pezinok on 28 May 2020. PHOTO TASR – Jaroslav Novák
Demand generates supply
Žilinka, who raised eyebrows with his move to scrap the specialised anti-extremism department at the Special Prosecutor’s Office shortly after he assumed office in December 2020, was elected by parliament with 132 votes, including those of ĽSNS MPs, though there’s no question of any connection between the two decisions.
Žilinka’s decision not to dissolve the party will now almost certainly be used by Kotleba in his political marketing efforts, according to Mesežnikov.
In the past, politicians from all parts of the political spectrum have on occasion politically legitimised LSNS when it suited them. In search of votes in parliament, SNS leader Andrej Danko, Smer leader Robert Fico and Igor Matovič, head of OĽaNO, have all found a way to reach agreement with ĽSNS.
Fico shook the hands of LSNS MPs after they supported him when parliament in May was deciding whether to approve a request for his pretrial custody. And Matovič, after a successful vote about family subsidies later that month, thanked ĽSNS MPs, too.
“I am proud of each and every one of them,” Matovič stated at the time in parliament. “You can say they are fascists as much as you want.”
However, during the ongoing government crisis, many coalition MPs, including some in Matovič’s own OĽaNO party, said that they were unwilling to vote or cooperate in any way with ĽSNS anymore. Some OĽaNO and Za Ludí MPs refused to support a coalition that would need to rely on votes of the far-right.
As a consequence, Slovakia’s public has recently been through a short but heated debate about whom should be considered a fascist, with politicians offering their views despite lacking any expertise in the matter.
To experts on extremism, running for parliament on the ĽSNS slate is the biggest red flag. Yet the recent past in Slovakia, in Europe and beyond has provided multiple examples of how the far-right changes and how fascist narratives make their way into the mainstream. It is not only men wearing a uniform resembling that of a World War II militia that represent a threat.
Nociar maintains that the dissolution of ĽSNS would help remove extremist and far-right elements from the Slovak political scene to some extent, but it has always been a fiction that banning any one party would solve the issue entirely.
“As long as there is a societal demand for this kind of politics, there will always be a political supply,” he sighs.
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