Supporters of Marian Kotleba’s party rally against migration in Bratislava in September 2015. ”Slovakia is not Africa!” reads the banner. Image still via RafaVideoart / YouTube. Some rights reserved.The journey from Budapest to Krakow takes you through the Tatra mountains and the small city of Banská Bystrica in central Slovakia. The country’s prime minister Robert Fico has not been in the international media spotlight as much as his neighbours, though not for want of trying. Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński once boasted of his intention to bring Budapest to Warsaw, by which he means to follow the political example of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Slovakia and the Czech Republic stand between them, but only geographically — these four states of the Visegrad Group have formed something of an anti-Brussels, anti-immigration, and some might say, “anti-European” entente.
Banská Bystrica’s recent history speaks to a particular image of these four friends. In 2013, the city elected one of Europe’s first overtly fascist mayors. Marian Kotleba is leader of the Our Slovakia party, which took 8% of the vote in Slovakia’s elections earlier this month, entering parliament for the first time with 14 seats. His face gurns from occasional billboards in the surrounding countryside, with quotes in Slovak lashing out at the “parazyti” who have invaded his country.
As Kotleba has recently described Hungary’s border fence with Serbia as a “palisade of European civilisation”, his feared parazyti could either be Roma (who may comprise up to 10% of the area’s population) or they could be refugees. I don’t speak Slovak, but for the purposes of this article I don’t need to. In comparison to western Europeans, those in the post-socialist east, it is assumed, are irredeemably racist, bigoted and xenophobic, whomever the object of their passions.
