Parties and Society in Slovakia

Abstract

Where the parliamentary elections in Slovakia in the autumn of 1994 suggested increasing fragmentation of the political scene, the formation by Vladimír Mečiar of a new coalition government in December confirmed that a distinctive feature of the country's party system was its polarization between `standard' parties comparable with Western models and `non-standard' political forces such as Mečiar's own Movement for a Democratic Slovakia. Explanations for Slovakia's divergence from the pattern found among its central European neighbours, where party systems closer to those of Western democracies had begun to develop, are to be found in the severity of communist rule and the absence of an effective opposition in the 1970s and 1980s as well as in post-communist developments and a popular and elite ambivalence towards reform.