3. The “Stable Instability” of Slovakia’s Party System

Slovakia is often presented as a country where political parties live fast and die young (Haughton & Deegan-Krause, The New Party Challenge. Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond. Oxford University Press, 2020). Most parties are leadership-dominated with few members and little or no organization below the national level—of which the most notorious is the “party” of Igor Matovič, whose specialty is to run from the bottom of the list. Among the major parties only Robert Fico’s Smer—Social Democrats has an unbroken presence in parliament since 2002. However, in the 2023 snap election two longstanding parties returned to parliament, and having won the election, Fico formed his fourth government. He thus confirmed his position as the longest-serving prime minister since the transition to democracy. Again, pundits worried about the future of democracy in Slovakia, and not only because of Smer’s government coalition with the nationalists elected on the slate of the longstanding Slovak National Party (SNS). In this chapter I will demonstrate that although Slovakia’s party system has been rather unstable, the continuity of Slovak politics is stronger than it appears at first glance, in terms of voting patterns as well as political elites. Paradoxically, the traditionally high electoral volatility arguably protects Slovakia against democratic backsliding because it makes it risky for anybody to try to follow in Viktor Orbán’s footsteps. Finally, Fico’s choice of coalition partners makes more sense once the conflict structure is taken into consideration.