THE 1963 Soviet children’s film “Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors” remains a holiday classic for many central and eastern Europeans. Twin schoolgirls in pioneer-style kerchiefs battle a series of mirages; deceitful mirrors make it hard for them to distinguish between heroes and villains. The plot strikes a chord with many voters in Slovakia as the country gears up for a general election on Saturday. Whether they look left or right, everyone they see is tainted by corruption scandals.
The incumbent, two-time prime minister, Robert Fico, leads a social-democratic party called Smer (Direction). At home, Mr Fico is known for handouts, including 13th-month pension payments and free public transport for students and the elderly. In Brussels, his current claim to fame is a lawsuit against the European Commission, objecting to the migrant relocation quotas approved in September last year. The prime minister’s competition consists of half a dozen centre-right parties with a reputation for bickering. Their last term in government lasted just 16 months; a coalition headed by Iveta Radicova, a popular academic, crumbled in a fit of dissension over the euro-zone’s bail-out fund.
To many voters, right and left are mirror images that cannot be trusted. According to Michal Vasecka, a sociologist, the country has largely given up its search for “white knights”. Mr Fico’s party is no stranger to scandal: two ministers and a parliament speaker in the outgoing government resigned over allegations of cronyism. Slovaks have been especially outraged by graft in the health-care sector. In 2014, the media exposed a suspicious tender for a CT machine worth €1.6m ($1.7m), awarded to a firm close to two prominent Smer members. (A Czech hospital bought the same machine for less than a third of the price.) The most notorious scandal came during Mr Fico’s first stint as prime minister, when the government sold carbon-emission permits at less than half the market price without a tender or auction. The estimated loss was €70m.
The centre-right opposition fares no better. In 2010 Ms Radicova ran on an anti-corruption ticket, and raised high hopes after putting all public procurement contracts online. A year later a leaked secret-service file exposed her coalition partners’ ties to tycoons, leaving voters disappointed again.
Even newcomers have failed to inspire. Radoslav Prochazka of the Siet (“Network”) party, who claims to transcend traditional party politics, has already tarnished his reputation with unaccounted campaign bills. He has no track record in government apart from a failed presidential bid in 2014.
“Democratic backsliding” is a familiar diagnosis for Slovakia and other countries in the region whose governments are mired in corruption, as in Romania and Moldova, or have begun restricting liberal rights, as in Hungary and Poland. But pundits may be too quick to level this charge. In a recent book, Richard Youngs of Carnegie Europe, a think-tank, suggests that the puzzle is more complex. Central and eastern European states may just be maturing into “non-Western democracies” that value income equality more highly than liberalism.
For that reason, Mr Fico is likely to stay on. A survey conducted on February 15th by Polis, a polling agency, gave Smer 34% of the vote, compared with just over 10% for the centrist newcomers of Siet. (Other parties draw between 5% and 9%.) “His redistributionist policies are at the core of [Mr Fico’s] appeal,” says Michal Horvath, a lecturer in economics at the University of York and a founding member of Slovakia’s Council for Budget Responsibility, an independent fiscal watchdog. He credits the prime minister for finalising pension reform. “People have come to terms with the fact that everybody in politics steals. He is the only one that shares something with them, at least.”
Such willingness to tolerate corruption in exchange for social benefits will not last forever. Mr Fico’s generation of politicians matured during the wild capitalism of the 1990s, when looting was the norm. Younger Slovaks are less forgiving. A wide range of civil-society activists and business groups are striving to change the country’s political culture. The Slovakian antivirus software company ESET, one of the country’s best-known firms, has launched a “Stop Corruption” initiative. Slovensko.digital, a civic activist group, is running a campaign to highlight Mr Fico’s government’s failed €1 billion bid to digitise public services by documenting the tedious processes Slovaks have to go through just to change their permanent residence or vote from abroad. Eventually Slovak citizens’ desire for honest, efficient government will find champions in the political arena. For now, though, voters are stuck with the candidates they have.