© REUTERS/Radovan Stoklasa

Slovakia may have gotten off to a slow start after the overthrow of communism 30 years ago, but it has since emerged as the star performer of the former Soviet bloc in Central and Eastern Europe. The largely rural country of 5.5 million people is the only Visegrad country in the eurozone and has enjoyed dynamic economic growth in recent years. Nevertheless, like many countries in the region it has been plagued by corruption.

However on March 16, with the surprising victory of an anti-corruption campaigner in the first round of the presidential election, Slovakia showed that it could emerge as a beacon of hope in its immediate neighborhood.

It looks increasingly likely that the March 30 run-off will see the election of 45-year-old lawyer Zuzana Čaputová, nicknamed Slovakia’s Erin Brockovich for her dogged battles against corruption and environmental malfeasance. A political unknown in the country until last year, she is everything that many of her opponents and their peers in other Eastern Europe countries like Hungary and Poland are not: pro-EU, liberal, worldly, principled—and a woman.

In polls, she leads her rival, Maroš Šefčovič, currently the country’s European Commissioner, who is running as an independent but was nominated by the ruling populist-left Smer-Social Democracy party. On March 16, he only managed just 19 percent of the vote compared to Čaputová’s remarkable 41 percent.

A Gust of Fresh Air

Čaputová appears to be exactly the gust of fresh air that Slovakia and much of the region could badly use. The divorced mother of two, who lives with her partner, made her name by opposing a landfill site agreed upon by a big-name oligarch and local politicos near her hometown north of Bratislava, Slovakia’s capital city, for which she won the Goldman Environmental Prize, informally called the Green Nobel. “This small, local case accurately reflects the situation in country,” she said earlier this year, “the battle of the little guy against the political and economic powers that be.”

The grassroots activist Čaputová is a product of Slovak civil society, not the sclerotic political establishment, much of which has been in place since the mid-1990s. Last year, she became vice-chairwoman of one of Slovakia’s newest parties, the left-liberal Progressive Slovakia, which will face its first real test by running in next year’s general election.

Čaputová’s candidacy, with her focus on equal justice for all Slovaks, captured her countrymen’s deep frustration with the graft and clientelism that riddles the country. Slovakia ranks poorly on Transparency International’s corruption register at 57^th in the world, behind Jordan and Rwanda but ahead of Hungary and Croatia. “Corruption was the number one issue by far,” says Gabriel Sipos, director of TI’s Slovakia branch. There has been little serious tackling of corruption, although last year two former construction ministers were jailed for graft.

“Backlash Against Populism”

Milan Nič, a Slovak analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) in Berlin, says that while the figure of Čaputová is significant, “this is a backlash against the populism and the captured institutions, such as the courts. People are simply disgusted with the corruption and weak institutions. Many consider it a last chance to change things or else they’ll leave for abroad.”

A turning point came last February, when the country was rocked by murder of the 27-year-old investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova. They were shot to death just as Kuciak was closing a story on ties between Slovakian politicians and the Italian mafia. Čaputová was one of tens of thousands of Slovak citizens who poured onto the streets across the country for weeks on end to protest the killing and stand up for media freedom. The demonstrations brought down Slovakia’s decade-long Prime Minster Robert Fico (who still heads Smer), but not the Smer-led government. Four men were eventually charged with the killings, and in mid-March multimillionaire businessman Marian Kocner was charged with ordering the murder.

On the campaign trail, Čaputová has promised to end what she calls the capture of the state “by people pulling strings from behind.” Also, in overwhelmingly Catholic Slovakia she has spoken in support for gay marriage, the right of gay couples to adopt, and women’s access to abortion. Breaking completely new ground for a national political candidate, she also directly addressed the country’s minorities in their own languages, using Hungarian, Romanesque, and Ruthenian on her Facebook page and on election night to thank her voters.

Moreover, Čaputová further burnished her reformist image with “the most transparent campaign in Slovakia ever,” says TI’s Sipos. “Her campaign bank account detailed every item, documenting how much went to Facebook, billboards, or voters‘ meetings.” Moreover, says Sipos, she was the only candidate who published detailed tax records.

Reaching Beyond the Base

Čaputová’s core support has come from urban voters, young people, ethnic Hungarians, and the liberal middle class that has emerged during the country’s post-Soviet economic upturn. Slovakia was resourceful enough to turn its Cold War-era tank and munitions factories into automobile assembly plants. Today, the country is, per capita, the world’s largest manufacturer of cars. Small, down-at-the-heel cities and towns that a decade ago looked passed over by the transition from communism, now boast revitalized downtowns, attractive cafes, and lots of new cars. In contrast to Romania’s migrants, many Slovaks who left the country have since returned.

However, Čaputová’s campaign bent over backwards to reach beyond her young and progressive base. “Hers is a whole new style of politics,” says writer and poet Juliana Sokolova from the old Habsburg town of Košice in eastern Slovakia. “She’s sincere and empathetic, not confrontational. And she doesn’t speak in political jargon,” says Sokolova, explaining why Čaputová’s appeal crosses traditional party and religious lines.

Just how definitively a Čaputová victory in the run-off will mean a fresh start for Slovakia—and break from the regional trend toward nationalism and authoritarianism—is anything but certain. For one, the current president, Andrej Kiska, is pro-European and has already started an anti-corruption campaign. The presidency itself is not particularly powerful office in Slovakia, although it does play a key role in picking justices for the constitutional court, the country’s highest judicial body. Moreover, surveys show that Slovaks are just as opposed to migration as their neighbors. In polls, the new parties, including Progressive Slovakia, still trail those of the establishment. And last week an unsettling 25 percent of Slovaks voted neither for Čaputová nor Šefčovič, but for far-right candidates.

Might the liberal vibes in Slovakia nevertheless spill over the borders to its neighbors? Hungarian social anthropologist Peter Krasztev from the Budapest School of Economics says his country’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán isn’t losing sleep over events in Slovakia. “We’ve tried absolutely everything to gain traction against Orbán and it hasn’t worked,” he says. “But still, Čaputová is a glimmer of hope. Maybe if Hungarians find someone as absolutely perfect as she is, really without a flaw, then perhaps we’d have a chance too.”

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© REUTERS/Thomas Peter

Nearly two decades since the end of the Yugoslav Wars, the Western Balkan’s states and peoples remain trapped in “Europe’s waiting room,” meandering endlessly through the morass of EU accession requirements on the path toward Brussels. Acceptance into the most prosperous economic union in history is at the end of this rainbow but in the meantime, by all available measures, the quality of governance and democratic administration in the region is in free fall—and that includes the region’s EU member states Slovenia and Croatia, those who have supposedly already found their pot of gold.

Worse still, the specter of violence is returning to the Balkans. Since the beginning of this year, the region has been shaken by the assassination of a leading Serb opposition figure in Kosovo, evidence of Russian-funded paramilitaries in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the re-arming of a recalcitrant nationalist regime in the country’s ethnically Serb dominated east, and an apparent anti-NATO suicide bombing in Montenegro, the alliance’s newest member.

Countries like Russia and Turkey, which trace long (and long imagined) ties to the region, are clearly at the tip of the spear. At a time when the liberal international order has heavily come under pressure, these regimes are aiming to reshape the Balkans, and they are finding receptive audiences among local governments. But the relationships they nurture in the region are of a decidedly sectarian nature, with Moscow as the chief international patron of the Balkans’ Serb nationalist establishment, and Ankara as the supposed protector of the region’s predominantly Muslim communities, namely, the Bosniaks and the Albanians.

Thus, the grand, transformative aspirations of the liberal-democratic international community have been supplanted by the provincial posturing of the world’s new “authoritarian international.” And one authoritarian regime, with growing interest in the region, has shown a capacity to truly bring all actors to the table in the Balkans: China.

Educating the Locals

Beijing’s activities have the appearance of pure economic self-interest. Beijing’s flagship venture in the region is the so-called “16+1” framework, the political forum of the country’s attempt to expand its “One Belt, One Road” infrastructure network into Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Pragmatism certainly seems like the defining characteristic of the country’s approach to the region: If you’re willing to do business with Beijing, Beijing is willing to work with you, regardless of your political conditions or persuasions.

To educate local communities about China and its interests, Beijing has begun opening chapters of its famed Confucius Institutes throughout the region. Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a population of less than four million, already hosts two of these centers. Belgrade, meanwhile, is to host a sprawling, 32,000 square meter Chinese cultural center commemorating Sino-Serbian ties. And in tiny Montenegro, China is constructing a nearly 200 kilometer-long highway from the Serbian border to the country’s main port at Bar.

Clearly, the €6 billion or so China has invested in the Western Balkans in the past decade is a much needed cash injection into a region that is still struggling to recover from the 2008 financial crisis. Best of all, China’s money appears to come with few strings attached, at least as compared to the complex loan protocols of the IMF, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and other similar Western financial institutions which have traditionally bankrolled the former Yugoslavia’s post-war recovery.

And given the titanic scale of the project Beijing is undertaking—attempting to link transportation networks from China, through Central Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and out to North Sea—the Chinese approach would appear to be very much results-oriented. To hear advocates sell the idea, China is not in the business of “conditionality,” it is simply interested in business itself.

Reality Check

But China’s approach to its growing economic and foreign policy clout is hardly so benign, especially for a region like the Western Balkans whose domestic democratic institutions are already wobbly. China’s apparent pragmatism is, in practice, a means for both locking client countries into punishing dependency structures while simultaneously buttressing illiberal and authoritarian elites and their already vast patronage networks, now newly awash with Chinese money.

Take only the example of Montenegro’s Bar-Boljare highway currently being constructed by Chinese contractors. Its cost is set to push the [Podgorica] government’s debt burden to close to 80 percent of GDP by 2018, according to IMF figures. In the event of catastrophic cost overruns—a distinct possibility in what is essentially a one-man mafia state—the Montenegrin economy would be at the whims of the Chinese regime, a sordid fate as Sri Lanka has recently discovered.

Nor is it the case that Beijing asks for nothing in return at the political level either. In the wake of the 2016 South China Sea arbitration, Montenegro explicitly rejected the ruling, and Serbia feigned neutrality on the issue. One might say that such small states cannot be expected to insist on Chinese compliance on any matter, but that is precisely the issue. Through its growing economic influence in Eastern Europe as a whole, China is seeking to indirectly institutionalize a pro-China lobby, thus securing much-needed international legitimation and support for its increasingly aggressive posture in East Asia in particular.

Challenging Brussels

It is difficult to untangle Beijing’s activities in the Balkans from its ascendancy in the political dynamics of Europe as a whole. And it is that fact that will make it difficult for Brussels, or any of the EU capitals, to form any coherent policy to check China’s growing pull in the continent’s Southeast. After all, this is the same EU that has watched the region’s political situation deteriorate to authoritarian retrenchment—and that was before the Russians, Turks, and Chinese began earnestly challenging Brussels’ commitments to being the “only game in town” in the Western Balkans.

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©REUTERS/Marcin Stepien/Agencja Gazeta

And yet, in one respect the refugee crisis has hit Poland just as much as the countries already coping with the influx of migrants: it set off a heated public debate touching upon the most sensitive aspects of Polish political life. Not surprisingly, Polish refugee policy was a controversial and divisive issue in the campaign before the general elections on October 25, an election which brought about – after eight years of the liberal Civic Platform party being at the helm – a change of government, with the national-conservative opposition Law and Justice party receiving its best-ever result of 39 percent of votes. But the election does not fully account for the depth and magnitude of the challenges posed by the still virtual migration problem in Poland.

In fact, the question of if and how Poland should take responsibility in the EU for dealing with refugees is forcing Polish society to confront long overdue questions about identity, community, and foreign policy. The refugee crisis has arguably started changing Poland even before the first migrants arrive in the country.

“They are not refugees, they are aggressors,” screams the front page of the leading conservative weekly Do Rzeczy, calling upon the government to “close Poland’s borders.” The new Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydło during the campaign was quoted saying that “instead of Arabs and Negros, Poland should first invite Poles from the East [Polish emigrants to Kazakhstan and other post-Soviet republics].” On the other hand, the liberal media, most notably the largest daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, have been instrumental in pushing the public debate in another direction entirely. That said, its call to support a demonstration at the end of September in Warsaw called “Refugees are welcome” attracted under 2000 people. The opposing nationalist demonstration was at least four times larger.

Deep-Rooted Concerns

Concerns about immigration and, more generally, encountering the “other” are deeply rooted in Poland, as they are in other Central and Eastern European countries. In a striking contrast to Western Europe, this region’s experience with multiculturalism (understood not as a policy but a social reality) is very limited, maybe even non-existent. The memory of Poland between the 16th and 18th century as a multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire has waned, and fails today to act as a source of identity for the modern nation-state. Prewar Poland was not an immigrant society, and its multicultural character was in no small part to do with the large Jewish (as well as Ukrainian and German) populations, which were long-established minorities in the territories that made up the Polish state at the time.

Today immigrants constitute just 0.3 percent of the country’s population. Accordingly, integration and refugee policies have ranked low on the political agenda for the last 25 years. Poland’s acceptance of around 80,000 Chechen refugees in the 1990s (who either assimilated quickly or left the country soon after) has not changed public perception of immigration or made it a matter of public concern. The refugee crisis and pressure from European partners to accept a fair share of responsibility found Polish society and the state wrong-footed, both mentally and politically. …

Read the complete article in the Berlin Policy Journal App – November/December 2015 issue.

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