O NE YEAR ago tens of thousands of demonstrators filled the streets of Slovakia’s cities. Shocked into action by the murder of Jan Kuciak, a young journalist probing links between ministers and organised crime, and his fiancée, they demanded an end to the corruption of their country’s elite. The protests toppled Robert Fico, the prime minister, and galvanised a generation.

They also convinced Zuzana Caputova, a 45-year-old liberal lawyer with no political experience, to run for president. “I suddenly found myself failing to justify why somebody else and not myself should assume responsibility for bringing about change,” she says. On March 16th, after a disciplined and dignified campaign, Ms Caputova took 41% of the vote in the first round of Slovakia’s presidential election. She is set to win the run-off on March 30th. Two months ago she was polling in single digits.

Victory would see Ms Caputova take office as the only unabashed liberal head of state or government in the central European “Visegrad” group. Poland has followed Hungary’s slide into illiberalism under Viktor Orban, and the Czech Republic is run by Andrej Babis, a Trumpy tycoon prone to scandal. Slovakia’s euro membership has always left it closer to Europe’s core, as even Mr Fico, who flirted with Orbanist populism when it suited him, had to accept.

The election also shone a light on Slovakia’s darker corners. Between them an Islamophobic populist and an outright neo-Nazi secured a quarter of the vote. Grigorij Meseznikov, a political analyst in Bratislava, says such “anti-system” forces are growing stronger. Yet although Ms Caputova’s support for the EU and NATO , climate policies and gay rights places her light-years away from the reactionary right, she hopes to seduce some of their voters with a Macronesque message of change. Top of her agenda as president, she says, will be to restore citizens’ trust in the rule of law.

Indeed, her rise has much to do with voters’ frustration with the grubby clientelism nurtured by Mr Fico’s Smer party, which remains in government. Beset by feuding, Smer will struggle in the run-up to a parliamentary vote that must be held in the next year. Two days before the presidential election, a businessman who cultivated links with Smer was charged with ordering Kuciak’s murder. A useful reminder of why Slovaks are demanding change.