Translation Martina Missiková

The winner of the 2009 European Parliamentary (EP) elections in Slovakia is the European People’s Party – European Democrats (EPP-ED) coalition. Its member parties are the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union-Democratic Party (SDKU-DS), the Hungarian Coalition Party (SMK) and the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH), which together scored six EP seats. The Party of European Socialists (PES), represented by Smer – Social Democracy (Smer-SD), came in second with five seats. One seat was “snatched up” by the Union for a Europe of Nations (UEN), to which the radical-nationalist Slovak National Party (SNS) swears allegiance, and one seat was won by the People’s Party – Movement for Democratic Slovakia (LS – HZDS), which does not belong to any party faction so far.

However, the EPP-ED is not the absolute winner. While five years ago it won the absolute majority of seats for Slovakia (eight out of 14), in 2009 it ended up with only six seats out of 13. The European Socialists, represented by Smer-SD, should be fairly content, as they gained two more seats compared with 2004 (five as opposed to three). However, the Slovak left has lost the overall battle against the right in this year’s European elections. Even though the representation of Slovakia at the EP, from the point of view ideological and political allegiances will be slightly more balanced compared to 2004, the more pronounced inclination of Slovak representatives towards other than left-leaning parties will remain the same in this electoral term

The domestic policy aspects of the 2009 European electoral results are interesting. With a turnout of almost 20%, the results of each party are not significant enough for far-flung conclusions to be drawn about their possible influence on further developments within the political environment. They can, however, mark the differences in the parties’ abilities to mobilise their supporters. This is where discrepancies suddenly arise between voting preferences, measured over the long term, for Smer-SD (40-45 %) and SNS (8-10 %) on the one hand and their actual electoral results on the other (32 % and 5.55 % respectively). In Smer-SD’s case, this phenomenon has been observed since the parliamentary elections of 2006. The party has really struggled to mobilise a certain portion of their potential followers in all other types of elections (communal and presidential)..

The EP election results show that this time around the ethnic (or anti-Hungarian) card was not very successful, even though it was promoted by SNS as well as Smer-SD. The extraordinary session of the Slovak National Council dedicated to the comments made by Viktor Orban on supporting autonomy for ethnic Hungarians living outside of Hungary is a good example. That was a harsh wake-up call, especially for the leaders of SNS. The party was aiming for a greater electoral win; in the end, it got into the EP literally by the skin of its teeth, as only 5.55 % of voters  supported it. It seems the party’s voters are more or less indifferent to EU and European integration issues; even theatrical anti-Hungarian alarms from the SNS leaders could not force them to come to the polls.

Centre-right parties earned a solid victory (notwithstanding some losses compared to 2004). SMK’s results (11.33 %) were virtually identical to previous elections and confirmed the notion that somewhat bigger, identity-based parties fare well even under generally lower voter turnout conditions. The enduring internal conflicts within the SMK have not deterred its voters to any critical extent, and they eventually sent two representatives of the Hungarian ethnic minority to the EP, strengthening the EPP-ED faction. KDH (10.87 %), which is also an identity-based type of party to some extent, did quite well too. They managed to prevent votes going to their competition, the coalition of the Conservative Democrats of Slovakia and the People’s Conservative Party (KDS-OKS) and kept a sufficient number of voters for two EP seats. It is becoming clear that the voter nucleus of KDH is conservative not only in terms of values, but also in its usual trend of voting behaviour.

 The representatives of SDKU-DS may have mixed feelings about their win (16.98 %). The party has succeeded in scoring an almost identical result as in 2004; in total, 20 000 more voters supported them in 2009 than in the previous election, but they will only have two seats in the EP as opposed to three. These fewer mandates are due to the existing formula for awarding seats, and the SDKU may feel hard done by, due to the fact that they needed considerably more votes per seat than some other parties did (e.g., SNS and KDH). However, that is more of a technical problem. The larger political issue for the SDKU is the fact that their potential voters were lured away by other centre-right parties, mainly the new Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) party, which stopped just short of entering the EP (4.71 % voter support) and  whichwill try to reach its main goal – to sit in the Slovak Parliament – in 2010.

The LS-HZDS has got itself into a difficult situation. On the one hand, they managed to hold on to their representation in the EP and to avert the complete fiasco which might have occurred had the European electoral results been the same as the party’s voter preferences in the latest opinion polls (4.2 – 4.4 %). However, their 8.97 % win, given such low preferential ratings, should be considered a relative success. On the other hand, the LS-HZDS is the party that lost the most seats in comparison to the previous electoral term and will only have one representative instead of three for  2009 – 2014. This is further confirmation of the weakening of the party, which is not helped in any way by the reshuffling in itsupper echelons, and there is no principal change ahead for the top leadership, which has been occupied continuously since 1991 by Vladimir Mečiar.

The reduced success of the Green Party (SZ) – only 2.11 % - will only be a surprise to those who do not recall how strong the Greens were in  opinion pollsduring the 1990s (up to 5 %)  and how they nevertheless always either lost completely when running alone, or did not significantly contribute to the success of the coalitions of which they were a part. Since the 2006 elections, the SZ have been virtually wiped off of voters’ radar screens thanks to their incomprehensible politics and weakly promoted activities, and the names of the party leaders either did not make any impression on voters or were altogether unknown. The attempt to revive the SZ by adding a couple of well-known personalities to their candidate list, combined with the party’s inertia and its leaders’ passivity, could not possibly have resulted in success (even though within the EU as a whole these elections saw the “green” parties succeed in getting a much better result than in 2004). Surpassing these unsuccessful SZ tactics is the relatively successful attempt of the SaS to become a relevant political force through systematically building the party, its agenda, its staff and its method of communicating with voters. The leaders of SaS identified completely with the party and its programme from the very beginning, which undoubtedly helped it to attain this good result and will definitely result in increased interest from the media.

The author is a political scientist and president of the Institute for Public Affairs, Bratislava (Inštitút pre verejné otázky).