Nationalist ex-PM eyes political comeback in Slovakia

BRATISLAVA: Former Slovak prime minister Vladimir Meciar, a hardline nationalist once criticised by the West for his dictatorial style, said this week that he was launching a new party to contest next year’s general election.

Meciar served three terms as prime minister between 1990 and 1998, with the United States and many European nations accusing him of authoritarianism and corruption while in office.

The West also warned at the time that his rule risked undermining Slovakia’s bid to join the EU and NATO, which it did under his centre-right successors in 2004. Meciar, 77, told the pluska.sk tabloid news website on Friday that he is building a new political party but declined to specify whether he would lead it in the election. “I have been doing a lot of work to create the party structure from the bottom. It has taken two years,” he told the site.

Borrowing a slogan from US President Donald Trump, Meciar said he plans to officially launch the new party that “puts Slovakia first” in September.

Jan Baranek, an analyst with the Bratislava-based Polis Slovakia think tank told AFP on Saturday that Meciar had “very limited” chances given strong competition from “numerous conservative and anti-liberal parties in Slovakia”.

In 2017, Slovak police dropped a probe into the unsolved 1995 abduction of the son of the country’s first president, a crime long suspected to have been masterminded by then premier Meciar. He has repeatedly denied any involvement. Meciar’s new political bid comes after liberal former president Andrej Kiska launched a centrist political party in June intended to join forces with the opposition to defeat the populist government. Slovak politics has been rocked by public outrage over the February 2018 murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak.

He had been probing alleged high-level corruption and contacts between top Slovak politicians and Italy’s notorious ‘Ndrangheta mafia when he was gunned down in his home.