Zuzana Čaputová was elected as the fifth President of Slovakia on Saturday, March 30, and as the first woman elected President in both Slovakia and the Visegrad Group of countries (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary), her victory marks an important milestone. She is also markedly pro-European and liberal in a region full of Eurosceptic populists. Despite bucking trends of gender and political persuasion, Čaputová’s success is largely attributable to her outsider status, similar to many of the populists in the region upon their initial rise to power. By overcoming a mix of right-wing agitators and the ruling party’s candidate, Čaputová will soon find herself in the Grassalkovich Palace, and in the position to make an immediate impact at home and abroad. Čaputová’s outsider status stands out in three parts. First, her opponent in the second round of the election, Maroš Šefčovič, was a product and emblem of the Slovak political system. Second, the other outsiders in Slovak politics, on the far right, stayed home on election day instead of voting for either Čaputova or Šefčovič. Third, Čaputová’s lack of previous elected office belies her political experience as an activist and a lawyer, putting her in prime position to run as a qualified outsider. This article concludes by arguing that, while Čaputová’s progressive political outlook will win her admirers across the European liberal sphere, her victory should not be seen as conclusive evidence that populism in Central and Eastern Europe is on the downturn.
To understand what makes Čaputová an outsider in Slovak politics, it is first important to understand what constitutes an “insider.” Čaputová’s opponent in the second round of the election was Maroš Šefčovič, who was a candidate of the current ruling party, Smer – Social Democracy (Smer – sociálna demokracia, Smer/Smer–SD). Smer was founded in 1999 and first took power in 2006 when the party formed a coalition government with its candidate, Robert Fico, as Prime Minister. Smer has retained power since then with only one break, from 2010 to 2012. While founded as an outsider party, they have undeniably become the leading force in Slovak politics and the definition of “insider.”
Smer’s insider status was also a determining factor in the prior presidential election, in 2014. In that election, the sitting Prime Minister Fico declared a run for President in what was seen as an attempt to end his political career “on top”—that is, in the cushy and largely ceremonial presidential office, removed from the mudslinging of parliamentary politics. Fico was widely expected to defeat the hodge-podge of opponents who signed up to run against him, but lost in the second round to businessman Andrej Kiska. Kiska, like Čaputová, was a political novice, which he used to his advantage in the campaign. He exercised his independence as President while in office, often clashing with Prime Minister Fico and Smer at large. However, despite his popularity and polls that suggested he could win a second term, Kiska announced in 2018 that he would not be running in the 2019 election, kicking off intense, unexpected speculation about who would run to replace him.
If the election had been two years earlier, any Smer-endorsed candidate would have been accorded frontrunner status. The tragic scandal of early 2018, however, prevented Smer from exercising this power for the 2019 election.
On February 21, 2018, Slovak investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kušnírová, were murdered in their home. Kuciak had been investigating links between politicians and organized crime in Slovakia, and his past work had put Fico and Smer under scrutiny. There was outrage across Slovakia immediately following the murders, precipitating massive public protests using the hashtag #allforjan and the eventual resignation of Robert Fico’s cabinet. However, Smer merely replaced Fico as Prime Minister with another party member, Peter Pellegrini, and the protests strengthened. Smer, and in particular its leadership, had found itself on the wrong side of both public opinion and that of President Kiska.
When Kiska announced he would be stepping down at the end of his term, then, Smer knew that it could not choose a candidate who had been too involved with the previous year’s crisis. This meant no Fico, but also none of the previously bright stars of the party—for example, former Interior Minister Robert Kaliňak, who had to resign under pressure for his handling of the Kuciak murder investigation. Instead, Smer looked to its faces abroad.
The first, and perhaps most obvious choice regardless of scandal, was Smer member and Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajčák. Lajčák has a sterling international résumé, including past service as President of the United Nations General Assembly and as High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina. Perhaps more importantly, Lajčák maintained high approval ratings in Slovakia, even while Smer’s ratings were falling, and polling in 2018 indicated an easy victory for him. However, Lajčák and his party split over the UN Global Compact for Migration. He tendered his resignation because Smer refused to support the compact, then withdrew it a week later after receiving pro-European policy assurances from Prime Minister Pellegrini. Why precisely Lajčák refused to run is somewhat of a mystery; perhaps he thought that he couldn’t win the race after all. Regardless, Smer had been banking on him running as their candidate, and only after the Compact fiasco in early December did the party realize it would need to find someone else.
That someone else turned out to be Maroš Šefčovič, who declared his candidacy only two months before the first round of the presidential election on March 16. Similar to Lajčák, Šefčovič had an international background: Šefčovič served as a diplomat for many years, including as a European Commissioner since 2009. This position left him sequestered in Brussels, away from domestic political drama back home, and thus untainted by Smer’s recent political struggles. It was readily apparent to Slovak voters, however, that Šefčovič was being brought in by the party and, although qualified for the position, didn’t seem to have the same drive that Čaputová did. Šefčovič adopted the Smer party line of supporting Christian values, in contrast to Čaputová’s support for LGBTQ+ rights; but in a televised debate, he was unable to name the Ten Commandments.
Šefčovič ultimately turned out to be inextricably tied to Smer, and that was enough to prevent him from picking up voters outside of the party’s base. He captured just over 752,000 votes in the second round, not dissimilar from Smer’s roughly 734,000-vote total from the last parliamentary election in 2016. Those 752,000 votes translated to 41.59% of the vote against Čaputová in the second round, clearly far from enough to win.
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Šefčovič was unable to convince many right-wing voters on the Slovak political spectrum to support him, due to both his insider status and his relatively liberal policies. About a quarter of the first-round vote went to two prominent right-wing candidates, Štefan Harabin and Marian Kotleba, who, despite their previous involvement in politics, were nonetheless viewed as outsiders. Harabin is a longtime associate of the former Prime Minister of Slovakia, Vladimír Mečiar, whose authoritarian-esque rule in the 1990s was divisive and drove many voters away from anyone ever associated with Mečiar and his party. Still, though, there were voters who appreciated what they saw as Mečiar’s strong leadership, and saw more of the same in Harabin’s record as Minister of Justice and then Chief Justice of Slovakia. This was enough to put him in third place in the first round, with 14.34% of the vote.
In fourth place was Marian Kotleba, an extreme right-wing politician who is sympathetic to the Nazi-allied Slovak State of the Second World War. Kotleba first made waves in 2013 when he was elected župan (governor) of the Banská Bystrica region, and his party, the People’s Party – Our Slovakia (Ľudová strana – Naše Slovensko, ĽSNS), won fourteen seats in parliament in the 2016 election. In that election, the party won about 210,000 votes, and Kotleba managed to expand that base only slightly in the presidential election three years later, garnering about 223,000 votes. Tellingly, he failed to capture the Banská Bystrica region he had governed for four years, winning only 14% of the vote there.
All in all, 2,145,364 voters participated in the first round, for a turnout rate of just under 49%, but only 1,847,417 voters came to the second round, for a turnout rate of just under 42%. The regions which voted most heavily for Harabin and Kotleba in the first round were also those that saw the largest drop-offs in turnout between the first and second round. Over 70% of Kotleba’s voters said they would stay home in the second round, as did 40% of Harabin’s supporters.
In short, Harabin and Kotleba voters largely stayed home rather than vote for Šefčovič or Čaputová. Šefčovič was perhaps slightly more in line with their politics, but he was a consummate insider, handpicked by the people in power. Čaputová was an outsider, but her liberal, progressive, and pro-European views were abhorrent to right-wing voters.
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It is not only that Čaputová was merely in the right place at the right time. Her outsider status is merely in reference to her experience in formal politics, but she has a wealth of experience elsewhere.
Čaputová is a lawyer by training who rose to prominence for a successful fourteen-year-long fight against a landfill in the town of Pezinok, for which she won international recognition. She also won attention, and many supporters, for her leadership of a movement to scrap amnesties granted by Vladimír Mečiar when he was in office as Prime Minister. The amnesties were eventually scrapped by the courts, and Čaputová entered politics via the Progressive Slovakia party (Progresívne Slovensko, PS) just a few months later. Her activist reputation in particular made her a clear outsider figure from the beginning, and her legal training prepared her well for the campaign trail.
Čaputová is undoubtedly an exciting candidate for many international observers due to her gender and political ideology. She is the first female president in the Visegrad region, and the first outspoken progressive to be elected to high office in the region in recent years.
Čaputová is also one more in a line of outsider successes in the Visegrad region. Čaputová follows the election of Andrej Kiska in her own country, and more recently Andrej Babiš as Prime Minister and Miloš Zeman as President in the neighboring Czech Republic. Looking even further back, both the ruling parties of Hungary and Poland started off with some degree of outsider roots before entrenching themselves firmly in power once winning election.
Because of her ideology and the limitations of the Slovak Presidency as an office, Čaputová will be both unwilling and unable to take extraordinary measures to keep herself and her cronies in power in image of Orbán or Kaczyński. There is no harm for European liberals in celebrating her victory, as they should have little fear for her management of Slovak democracy.
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Some of the big questions after Čaputová’s election can be answered quickly. Will she spar with both Smer and political opponents abroad? Absolutely. Will her approval ratings drop off at some point? Almost surely. Does her election signal the next step forward for the #allforjan movement? It would be hard to find a better step for the movement to take. Čaputová herself said that Kuciak’s murder inspired her to run for office.
But is Čaputová’s election a sign that Slovak or regional politics are undergoing a larger change? The evidence is inconclusive.
First, on Slovakia. Čaputová’s election will boost the anti-corruption and women’s rights movements in Slovakia, but Slovak law limits how much of a direct effect she can have as President. The current parliament rejected the Istanbul Convention on women’s rights shortly before the second round of the election. Their priorities and Čaputová’s will not always be in line, to say the least, but her public prominence will surely aid the causes she is passionate about.
Whether Čaputová’s election translates into further political gains, however, remains to be seen. Slovakia is due for a general election next year, but a year is a long time. Čaputová’s Progressive Slovakia party was far behind or not even registering in polls as of February, but after her victory, their coalition ticket with the Together – Civic Democracy party (SPOLU – občianska demokracia) moved up to second place in the polls. Whether this movement is merely a “Čaputová bump” or the first step in a larger trend is anyone’s guess.
European Parliament elections, however, are this spring. Their proximity to Čaputova’s election and the excitement generated by it, as well as the traditionally low turnout in Slovakia (13% in 2014) means that the Progressive Slovakia-SPOLU coalition should be able to do well if it can motivate voters to come to the polls.
Second, on regional politics. Some voters in the other Visegrad countries are similarly tired of the same corrupt people being in power for many years. However, the barriers to electoral success are extraordinarily high in Hungary. Orbán has curtailed opposition media and the main opposition is to his right, but, more importantly, most important politics are done at the local level through parties. Independent, outsider candidates are no longer able to break into the Hungarian system.
In Poland, two parties on the right dominate national politics, and liberal upstarts have struggled to break in. While an independent could theoretically run for President, the establishment parties would likely choke them out.
In the Czech Republic, there is perhaps more hope for a breakthrough, as Babiš’s government is unstable and Zeman is serving his last term. The Czech Pirate Party (Česká pirátská strana) has the third-most seats in parliament, and, with a growing national membership, they could be poised to take the reigns from Babiš and Zeman. So too, however, could the populist, xenophobic Freedom and Direct Democracy (Svoboda a přímá demokracie, SPD) party led by Tomio Okamura.
There is no reason to conclude that Čaputová is the first among many progressives to start winning election across the region. The barriers to entry are high and the odds are low, but stranger things have happened. If the current populist age of politics has taught us anything, it’s that you should never discount the underdog.
Ben Gardner-Gill is a senior studying history.