First casualty

Slovakia's centre-right government has succumbed to the eurozone's sovereign debt crisis, losing a confidence vote tied to a bill on ratifying the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF). The result plunges the country into instability and also has eurozone officials worried, although it seems Slovakia will ratify the bolstered bailout fund in a second vote to be held later this week. So what do we know about Slovakia?

Slovakia is one of Europe's newer nations, born out of the breakup of Czechoslovakia on January 1st, 1993. It had one, rather unfortunate previous experience of independent statehood - in 1939, after Nazi Germany had invaded what remained of Czechoslovakia, it became a clerical fascist state loyal to Berlin. The state and its leaders are still lauded by some on the far-right of Slovak politics, who dismiss the 80 years Slovaks spent alongside Czechs in the joint state of Czechoslovakia - born out of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 - as a time when Slovak national aspirations were suppressed by the central authorities in Prague.

Early years

The early years following independence in 1993 were not happy ones; the country soon entered the doldrums of European politics, falling under the sway of authoritarian leader Vladimir Meciar, who led a series of shaky coalitions. His abuses of power led Slovakia to be sidelined in Europe; its membership of NATO and the European Union put on hold.

The broad alliance of center-right, center-left and ethnic Hungarian parties that finally replaced him in 1998 - led by new prime minister Mikulas Dzurinda - quickly put the country back on track, culminating in NATO and EU membership six years later. Slovakia, it seemed, had returned to the fold of European democracies, and had dragged itself out of what the Czechoslovak-born US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright referred to as 'the black hole of Europe'.

But the painful austerity reforms of two successive Dzurinda governments - reforms that were designed to bring Slovakia's deficit under control and meet the Maastricht criteria necessary for adopting the euro - caused resentment among many ordinary Slovaks, many of whom voted for leftist leader Robert Fico in 2006. He formed a controversial coalition with the far-right Slovak National Party and Meciar's Movement for a Democratic Slovakia - unusual bedfellows for a European social democrat - and once again Slovakia began to drift, slightly, out of Europe's mainstream political orbit.

The Fico government will be remembered for a worsening of tensions with neighboring Hungary - Slovakia spent 1,000 years as a province of the Hungarian Kingdom, and still has around 500,000 ethnic Hungarians living along the Danube, in southern Slovakia.

'Solidarity'

When Fico was defeated in 2010 by - once again - a diverse coalition of center-right and Hungarian parties, they promised to restore Slovakia's battered reputation. Many analysts had high hopes for the coalition led by Iveta Radicova, which took office in July 2010. It lasted just 15 months, destroyed by divisions, this time over the euro - which Slovakia adopted on January 1st, 2009 - and how to save it from peril. Richard Sulik, whose Freedom and Solidarity party refused to support bolstering the bailout fund, explained the simple economic realities which made "solidarity" with other eurozone countries so unfeasible.

"There's a lot of talk at the moment about solidarity, that Slovakia must show solidarity with other countries," Sulik told foreign journalists last week, after weeks of talks had failed to budge him on his opposition to solving the debt crisis by lending countries more money. "The average pension in Slovakia is less than 400 euros. The average pension in Greece is 1,400 euros – that's three, four times higher," Sulik said.

"It's impossible to explain to a Slovak pensioner that he or she has to contribute – in the form of higher VAT for example – towards Greek pensions," he added. "That's not solidarity. That's a perverse concept of solidarity."

Many, though perhaps not most of Slovakia's 5.5 million people share that view. They suffered years of austerity in order for their country to adopt the euro - the first post-communist country to do so after Slovenia - and are now being asked to bail out nations who lived beyond their means and then cooked the books.

There's a joke currently doing the rounds in Bratislava - "For 400 euros you can adopt a Greek. He'll stay at your place, sleep late, drink coffee, have lunch and then take a nap, so you can go to work."

Many Slovaks - the second poorest nation in the eurozone after Estonia - feel the joke is on them.

Author: Rob Cameron / sk
Editor: Chuck Penfold