I could just about write my analysis of this in Slovak but I’ll resist the urge. Suffice to say that Pellegrini won this election with an appeal to lies, fear, hate and with extensive foreign interference. He got through to the second round by posing as a centrist and then mobilized to grab the neo-Nazi and pro-Russia vote even as his opponent (Korcok, former foreign minister and ambassador to the U.S.) got more votes than the current incumbent president. Slovakia’s president is much weaker than the U.S. president. This basically removes any institutional hurdles (not brakes) to the criminal group currently in government.
There’s lots of comparisons to the way the GOP behaves and who they mobilize, and how they exploit foreign interference. Example: Slovakia has a “campaign moratorium” where all public campaigning stops 48 hours prior to polls opening until poll closure. The winner of this election went to Hungary and gave a fawning interview to state TV which Orban then ran almost non-stop through the moratorium. Slovakia is home to about 500,000 ethnic Hungarians who all are in the Hungarian media space. Non-stop diet of Orban telling them who to vote for and calling the democratic bloc tools of Soros. Every accusation is a confession.
Slovakia is rapidly turning into No Country For Young Men (Women, Gays, Educated, Tolerant, Kind….). I personally know about a dozen of the smartest Slovaks who bailed to Czech Republic and many more weighing the move. There’s almost no linguistic friction and you can even study for free in Czech schools so for about a decade the top 30 percent of Slovak students have gone to Czech schools. That will speed up and the current crowd of Kremlin tools can rule over an empty European Appalachia full of terrified pensioners, literal Nazis, and oppressed Roma. Here’s what one of my smartest friends, who is leaving, texted me:
The thing is— that’s fine with them. Just like that vision is appealing to our GOP.
Oh, and today Zelenskyy announced that Ukraine will lost without Congressional action. He’s right (which is why I’m too angry to go near the DT thread now). And Anastasis and GRU and the GOP that wants us to be more like Russia and Slovakia can suck each other off.