‘Territorial memory’?

According to Mayor Kollar, voters in Hlohovec have historically favoured strong leaders — first the authoritarian-leaning Vladimír Meciar in the 1990s and later Robert Fico, who has led the ruling Smer party for the past 15 years.

In 2012, at the peak of Smer’s strength, Fico’s party scooped up slightly more than 50 per cent of the town’s vote.

In the 1990s, Meciar’s People’s Party – Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) and the similarly nationalist Slovak National Party together used to get more than 55 percent here.

“Now that these parties are losing support, people are moving towards parties that are perhaps even more undemocratic, authoritarian and extremist,” said Kollar, who organised a counter-protest to a rally of LSNS supporters in the town ahead of EU elections in May.

Back in the 1990s, sociologist Vladimir Krivy set out to draw an electoral map of Slovakia’s regions.

He found that areas that particularly favoured HZDS were almost identical to strongholds of the fascist Slovak People’s Party (HSLS) during World War II. This national-populist tendency, as Krivy called it, holds true for Hlohovec.

Town chronicles reveal that Hlohovec had its own regional cell of the Hlinka Guards, a fascist paramilitary group, from October 1938.

A photo taken that year shows the Hlinka Guards marching through the main square during a visit to the town of top HSLS officials.



“The locals were very welcoming of this ideology back then,” said historian and Hlohovec native Marian Kamencik, citing a survey recorded in the town chronicles showing that 70 per cent of Hlohovec residents approved of the political leadership of the country shortly after the HSLS won at the ballot box in 1938.

For sociologist Gyarfasova, this is evidence of “some kind of ‘territorial memory’ and a leaning towards the authoritarian parties that is transferred from generation to generation”.

But she added: “It is not the whole explanation”.

Young men in uniforms

Across the Vah river is Sulekovo, a large village that is administratively part of Hlohovec. The two electoral districts in Sulekovo post higher support for LSNS than the town does — over 30 per cent in one of the districts.

Sulekovo is also one of the few villages in the region with a Roma minority, the usual target of far-right slogans in Slovakia.

Locals say Roma families have lived here for as long as anyone can remember, mostly in the village centre. While in reality there are few tensions between Roma and other residents, Kollar concedes that some people in Sulekovo do complain about these families.

For a number of years, the village was the site of annual marches by members of Slovak Togetherness, a far-right group formerly led by Kotleba. (The group was banned in 2006 on the grounds that it was unconstitutional, though it continued as a civic organisation.)

Now that these [authoritarian-leaning] parties are losing support, people are moving towards parties that are perhaps even more undemocratic, authoritarian and extremist.

The lure for the marchers was the village’s memorial to Viliam Sulek and Karol Holuby, members of a 19th-Century nationalist movement led by renowned poet and philosopher Ludovit Stur.

The two were tried and executed for taking part in a revolution against the monarchy in 1848, and the village was later named after Sulek.

While some villagers recall the Slovak Togetherness marchers wearing black uniforms like those of the Hlinka Guards, few see a connection between the village’s notoriety as a neo-fascist pilgrimage site and recent election results.



A memorial to nationalists in Sulekovo has for years been a neo-fascist pilgrimage site. Photo: Michaela Terenzani

The vogue vote

Ratkovce is a village of some 350 people on the northern edge of the Hlohovec district. In the recent European Parliament vote, LSNS scored more than 24 per cent here.

Locals also disproportionately backed Kotleba in his run for president in March, handing him a first-round victory in Ratkovce with 23.7 per cent.

“The support for LSNS is distributed among all groups of residents,” said Martin Cervenka, mayor of the village since 2010. “There is no particular type of people who you could say vote for this party in our village.”

He admits he finds the far-right leanings of some of his fellow citizens perplexing.

“Even good people who are always ready and willing to help others identify themselves with these slogans,” he said, blaming ignorance and political apathy.

“People basically don’t have major problems here, so sometimes they simply need to make them up,” he said.

It is precisely the lack of problems that puzzles the experts.

“This is an issue that troubles many sociologists and psychologists nowadays — we cannot give generally valid factors that lead people to vote for extremist parties,” Gyarfasova said.

Young people vote for Kotleba out of protest, to define themselves against the mainstream, but they do not realise that this party undermines the foundations of democracy.

She does not rule out the possibility that supporting LSNS has simply become fashionable for some — especially teenagers.

She cited a recent study (in Slovak) of the causes of radicalisation of Slovaks aged 14-17, which found that right-wing extremism cuts across geographies, age groups, family circumstances, ethnicity, social backgrounds and other divisions.

“Young people vote for Kotleba out of protest, to define themselves against the mainstream, but they do not realise that this party undermines the foundations of democracy,” Gyarfasova said.

The attraction of Kotleba is that he names problems directly, eschews political correctness and speaks up against corruption and cronyism, she added.

Juraj Hladky, a university lecturer who also serves as deputy mayor in Leopoldov, a small town next to Hlohovec, said he knew no older people who support Kotleba.

The reason that young people tend to fall for extremist slogans is that Slovakia has no “active education of people towards peace, or towards tolerance”, he said, citing low awareness of the Holocaust as an example.

“This is the only thing that I really fear: that this ‘brown [fascist] ideology’, very insidious, will come back,” Hladky said. “And I don’t feel like anyone in Slovakia really cares about that. That’s the terrible part — politicians are only able to unite when their own personal benefits and profit are at stake.”

This is the latest in a series of stories about far-right extremism. See also: