Slovakia: Euroscepticism as a Changing Notion in Electoral Campaigns

For many years Eurosceptic parties were an unknown phenomenon in Slovakia. During the pre-accession period, the European Union’s (EU) integration was taken across the political spectrum as a valence issue—generally accepted as a good thing. After 2004, the broad consensus on the strategic importance of EU membership turned into a comfortable but passive consensus with respect to the European agenda and to Slovakia’s performance in the EU. At least until 2011 when the Greek bail out and Slovakia’s support for the European Financial Stability Facility came up in the agenda. The coalition partner liberal party Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) refused to support it (and the vote broke the centre-right government). SaS argued that the EU rejected the principle of the market economy and criticized the EU for being “too redistributive”. The neo-liberal slogan “EU = road to socialism” developed into one the emerging faces of Euroscepticism. The Slovak nationalists stood for the other face and represented the “text-book example” of the peripheral nationalism against regional and global institutions. The nationalists’ arguments go further on in losing their (national) sovereignty and identity. Nevertheless, none of these two faces became politically influential.