Last Week: Slovakia, the home of confused Europeans

Welcome to your weekly commentary and overview of news from Slovakia. After 20 years in the EU, not all Slovaks feel European. A suspected pro-Russian propagandist from Ukraine is apparently being sheltered in Slovakia. The country drops 12 places in a major ranking of media freedom.

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If you have a suggestion on how to make this overview better, let me know at michaela.terenzani@spectator.sk.

After 20 years in the EU

On May 1, inhabitants of the western-Slovak village of Dechtice took to the streets. It was the 20th anniversary of Slovakia’s EU accession – but that was not the theme of the event, which has been organised by the village annually now for the last five years. In fact, quite the opposite: residents donned the blue shirts and red scarves of the Pioneers, the pre-1989 Communist Party’s youth organisation, along with the uniforms of hospital nurses and police of the time, to re-enact the May Day parades that everyone was once forced to attend in order to celebrate Labour Day.

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This year, the mayor of the village, who describes the event as “good fun” had by all, thought to add what he called another “improvement” – and displayed portraits of Lenin, Engels and “our Mister President Gustáv Husák” on the front of the Municipal Office building. Portraits of this type were formerly put out during Labour Day parades, to be saluted by the crowd as they marched past. Husák, who as well as serving as president of Czechoslovakia between 1975 and 1989 and replacing Alexander Dubček at the head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party following the Soviet-led invasion of the country in 1968 – is a symbol of the era that came to be known as “normalisation”. During this period the regime tightened its grip on inhabitants, conducted purges that ruined the lives of thousands of people, and sealed the country’s borders to prevent most citizens from leaving.

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Dechtice is not the only place in Slovakia where “retroparades” like this take place. A Dechtice inhabitant who wrote to the Sme daily about the event in his hometown said that one of the many things that disturbed him about it was the attendance of children. “What are they going to learn from this, that the communist era was fine? This is not the direction that we should be going,” he said.

Red-star chic

Many do not share his opinion and consider the re-enactment of communist-era parades to be just innocent fun. After all, what is to stop them?

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