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‘We don’t want to have to go abroad to work’

Slovakia, where central Europe really begins

Outside its capital, Slovakia has low wages and high unemployment. It can’t meet basic social needs, inequality is growing, and many seek work abroad.

by Philippe Descamps 
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Alena Kalejova with her baby Daniela in the eastern village of Ostrovany
Joe Klamar · AFP · Getty

Old Bratislava has been restored in the last two decades, and tourists crowd its narrow streets, but it is still scarred by the legacy of communist Czechoslovakia, with boxy housing and a motorway that cuts between the castle and the cathedral. There are modern eyesores too: shopping malls and featureless office blocks with the names of foreign companies. Their profusion suggests a return to prosperity, and experts talk of ‘robust economic performance, with strong growth backed by a sound financial sector, low public debt and high international competitiveness drawing on large inward investment’ (1).

Where the Danube meets the Morava, below Devín Castle, there’s a memorial to those killed trying to cross the iron curtain to the West between 1948 and 1989; further south, the huge Gabčíkovo-Nagymaros dam, opposed by ecologists in the 1980s, is now a destination for ramblers. The Bratislava region is one of the European Union’s six richest by GDP per head (2), so it’s hard to explain Slovakia’s anti-Roma rhetoric and rejection of migrants, its indifference to European elections and the growing popularity of nationalist parties. Understanding these means looking beyond the concentration of foreign investment and corporate headquarters in Bratislava: elsewhere, incomes are barely half the EU average.

The real central Europe starts beyond the suburbs of Bratislava. On a train heading east, a schoolteacher from Košice told us: ‘Schools and hospitals are in a terrible state. We’re short of everything. Most of my colleagues have gone to work in banks or insurance companies, or abroad. Only people who really love the job are still hanging on.’ She teaches history and the arts to 10-15 year-olds. She wouldn’t tell us her name, but did say she earns €600 a month. ‘At least it’s more than nurses are paid: my sister was getting €400. In the end, she went to Austria.’

Most teachers in her school were ready to strike over pay, but the headmistress knew how to manipulate them. ‘The school board and the government exploit our weaknesses, our inertia and our feelings of guilt towardsthe children.’ The school managed to procure supplies and equipment without putting too much of a burden on parents. ‘In 2013 Košice was honoured with the title of European Capital of Culture.We took the opportunity to get the computers we neededpaid for out of structural funds.’ For the past decade, the Slovakian government has relied heavily on EU funding for public investment, especially in schools and roads.

Just over three hours away by train is Banská Bystrica, capital of central Slovakia. It’s impossible to miss the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising, on a hill overlooking the city centre. It was here, on 29 August 1944, that the Slovak National Council, formed to lead the resistance, launched an uprising against Nazi Germany and the collaborationist First Slovak Republic, headed by Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest. The Wehrmacht regained control that October, and rebel soldiers and resistance fled to the mountains to wait for the Red Army, but the uprising showed that not all Slovaks supported the fascist regime.

‘Radical ideas are appealing’

Banská Bystrica owes its current notoriety to the election of Marian Kotleba of the People’s Party-Our Slovakia (ĽSNS) as regional governor in 2013. To promote himself and beat his second-round Social Democratic opponent, caught up in corruption scandals, Kotleba made speeches with neo-fascist overtones and appeared in a uniform recalling the Nazi era. As ĽSNS also won 8% of the vote in the March 2016 general election, Kotleba and 13 other members sit in the national parliament, where they campaign for Slovakia to leave NATO and the EU. Though Kotleba faces legal proceedings over his use of Nazi symbols, and has been able to do little as governor since he has no majority on the council, he is thought likely to be re-elected this November.

‘True believers are few and far between. People vote for Kotleba out of despair,’ said Ján Lunter, who is standing against him. ‘Rising poverty and long-term unemployment mean that radical ideas are appealing.’ Lunter worked as an IT specialist for an agricultural cooperative until 1989. He then moved into computer services, and later started a food company, Alfa-Bio, which employs 200 people locally: ‘I want to show that you can change things with an approachbased on the development of quality agriculture and tourism.’

Like many other candidates, he is standing as an independent. ‘It’s also possible to integrate Roma people, as I’ve done in my company. They are 10% of the workforce.’That may not be enough to win over voters, especially as there will be only one round in this election. The main candidates, including Stanislav Mičev, director of the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising, decided to wait for opinion polls in September before standing down in favour of the candidate best placed to defeat Kotleba, though this has unintentionally strengthened Kotleba in his anti-establishment stance.

Love-hate relationship

The hilly landscape near Muránska Planina National Park illustrates the history of the last decades, from rapid industrialisation in the 1960s and 70s to the brutal dismantling of the socialist economy in the 1990s. There are bare patches in the forests from recent clear-cutting. Every town has a mine, a quarry and a factory with tall chimneys, though very few are still smoking. In the small town of Tisovec, outside the house of Vladimír Clementis, a local man who became foreign minister of Czechoslovakia under the communists and was executed in 1952, we met three young men in an old Škoda car. They were all born after the fall of the Berlin Wall and more concerned with the present than the past.

‘If I could earn around €1,000 a month, I’d stay here,’ said the first, a vehicle painter who works in Vienna, five hours drive away, where he earns €2,000, ‘plus housing and travel allowances, which mean I can come home almost every weekend.’ The second, a delivery driver who still works locally, was not allowed to say how much he earns, but I gathered it was barely more than the minimum wage (€435): ‘Since we joined the eurozone [in 2009], prices have been rising, but not wages. OK, we get EU funding, but it all goes on roads and schools. Very few people benefit in terms of jobs.’ The economist Joachim Becker (3) says: ‘In Slovakia, the limitations of the EU’s regional policy and its lack of industrial policy are clear to see. It’s not enough to build infrastructure in peripheral regions; you need productive investment. I don’t see a solution to the growing regional disparities other than public initiatives.’

OK, we get EU funding, but it all goes on roads and schools. Very few benefit in terms of jobs — Slovakia-based delivery driver

The third Škoda passenger earns less than €600 a month at the local Calmit lime works. But since it was taken over by an Austrian firm, modernisation and the replacement of kilns with less polluting technology have led to job cuts. When he said they were not interested in politics, the others agreed: ‘Money brings out the worst in people’s character. Old people say socialism was better. Our parents believed the promises the politicians made in the 1990s, but now they are very critical. We just want a situation where our friends don’t have to go abroad to find work.’ In 2015 nearly 150,000 Slovaks (6.1% of the economically active population) commuted to jobs across the border, out of an estimated 250,000 working abroad (4). This fosters a love-hate relationship with the West.

One of Kotleba’s main exploits took place in the village of Krásnohorské Podhradie near the town of Rožňava (annexed by Hungary between 1938 and 1945). After an accidental fire, too hastily blamed on Roma boys, damaged the castle in September 2012, Kotleba arrived in the village’s Roma quarter with his thugs and some old deeds, which he claimed gave him the right to evict families occupying properties there. ‘Everyone was scared,’ said Ľudovít Gunár, a community leader who was the only Roma on the village council at the time. ‘I went on the radio to tell the other residents, many of whom belong to the Hungarian ethnic minority, that we needed to stick together, because next time it might be them.’

Since then, EU funds have paid for the village’s main street to be asphalted and its water supply system rebuilt, but the Roma quarter still differs sharply from other parts of the village, with extreme poverty and small, badly insulated houses haphazardly thrown together; it is also much livelier, with children, animals and music in the streets. As in the rest of Slovakia, the Roma are ghettoised. Their life expectancy is 11 years less than the Slovakian average for men, 14 years for women.

‘When I was young,’ said Gunár, ‘everyone worked in farming or the garment industry, and all the boys went to the same school. But 20 years ago, the whites [non-Roma] decided to send their children to Rožňava. Now our children are the only ones attending the village school, and around three-quarters of my neighbours are claiming unemployment benefit.’The Roma, estimated at around 450,000 out of a population of 5.4 million, have suffered from the disappearance of unskilled agricultural jobs, and account for a large proportion of the long-term unemployed. Slovakia holds the EU record in this field, as 7.1% of its economically active population has been out of work for more than 12 months. The unemployed get €62 a month, which they can double if they do 17 hours of community work. ĽSNS and other political parties claim the benefits are far too generous, and that they make people dependent on the state.

Privatised housing obstacle to policy

Košice, a major city in eastern Slovakia, decided in 1995 to change its housing policy and relocate struggling households to the borough of Luník IX, now one of the biggest Roma ghettos in central Europe. Most non-Roma families moved to Sídlisko Ťahanovce, in the north of the city, the last big communist-era housing estate, with 22,000 residents.

When it was built, in the early 1980s, the aim was to make the most efficient use of space, and the result was a mass of large low-rise buildings and high-rise blocks; Sídlisko Ťahanovce has the highest population density in Slovakia. The mayor, Cyril Betuš, is proud of the many shops, schools and sports facilities that bring life to the estate, but notes a major obstacle to all public policy in Slovakia: private ownership. ‘The original plan didn’t allow for the growth in the number of cars. Today, we need to create more space to avoid congestion at rush hour and make parking easier, but we find it virtually impossible to enforce compulsory purchases. The communists didn’t follow the proper procedures for expropriating landlords, and the restitution law of 1989 allows them to do what they like.It’s hard to find them all, and when we do, the prices they ask are prohibitive.’

Privatisation of housing also makes it difficult to take in migrants. Sídlisko Ťahanovce used to take in people of many different nationalities, including refugees from Chernobyl after the 1986 disaster, but now has no social housing.

Not equal partners

The peaks of the High Tatras, Slovakia’s pride, appear on the national flag below a two-barred cross. At their foot, in Slovakia’s poorest region, is the walled town of Levoča, where the country’s first high school was built. Levoča also has a statue of Ľudovít Štúr, who standardised the Slovak language in the 19th century, and regarded villages, the countryside and the language as the foundation of ‘national life’. Slovaks today preserve their rustic past and folklore through festivals,and often refer to it publicly. This return to the ethnolatry of the post-independence years is a sign of stagnation in the national narrative. The Slovaks have supposedly fulfilled their collective destiny by building a state of their own, but over the past 25 years the welfare state has disintegrated. EU subsidies partially make up for insufficient public investment, but lack transparency, are often associated with corruption scandals, and keep Slovaks dependent.

Juraj Marušiak, a political scientist at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, said: ‘The communists never managed to foster anti-western sentiment, but it’s become very strong today. People seem to be more demoralised than they were then. It doesn’t bode well for the future.’ Real incomes rose by around 50% between 1970 and 1985, butfell during the 1990s; GDP only recovered to its 1989 level in 2007. ‘Slovaks feel the West doesn’t see them as equal partners. They are deeply frustrated by the effects of neoliberal reforms, for which they blame the elites.’

Brigita Schmögnerová, finance minister from 1998 to 2002, said: ‘There’s always been a consensus on social dumping among those in power. Since the enlargement of the European Union, foreign companies have been looking for cheaper labour, but instead of working together, governments in the region have competed to offer the lowest tax rates.’ When Slovakia joined the EU in 2004, it became the first OECD country to introduce a single tax rate across the board: 19% on corporate profits, incomes and consumer goods. The lack of progressiveness led to rapid growth of inequality, and social issues have helped the Social Democratic Party to win elections. Robert Fico has been elected prime minister three times (2006, 2012 and 2016) and is now serving his third term, after a short interruption between 2010 and 2012.

Not enough state funding

As head of the social-democratic party Smer-SD (5), Fico has kept power by making superficial changes to the neoliberal model imposed when Slovakia joined the EU, without reducing the country’s advantage in terms of low wages. Income tax is now levied at rates of 19% and 25%, food is taxed at only 10%, shops are closed on public holidays, short-term contracts are discouraged, those no longer eligible for unemployment benefit receive a minimum allowance, and students and pensioners get free travel on public transport.

Fico often mentions the welfare state in speeches, but the government doesn’t do enough, and spending on health, education and housing is well below the EU average. Smer-SD, which governs in coalition with a number of nationalist parties, presents itself as a catch-all party and often takes a conservative position on social issues. Fico has said that Islam has no place in Slovakia, and at Smer-SD’s last party conference, in December 2016, announced measures against ‘the second generation who do not want to work’ and those who ‘abuse the system’, adding ‘not just the Roma.’ Miroslav Tížik, a sociologist at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, said: ‘Robert Fico uses the same language as his colleagues. It’s much easier to use the language of intolerance in a country where public spiritedness is broken. The media today like to moralise, talking of the need for tolerance, but they have spent 25 years trumpeting the idea that people should look out for themselves and not worry about others.’

We met Karol Klobušický at Partisan Meadow in the foothills of the Carpathians, which overlook Bratislava. In 2005 he led a successful student strike to keep higher education free. Since then, he has advised Slovakia’s doctors, helping them to stop the privatisation of hospitals, and has been involved in the recent strike at Volkswagen, which forced the management to back down (see We won’t be slaves to western companies).

The unions are too weak,’ he said, ‘and that’s what accounts for the growth of extremism. The strike revealed huge frustration. Slovak workers no longer understand why their wages should be so low compared to those of their comrades in the West. They think they are victims of racism, and are being paid less because they are Slovaks. So it’s easy to make them believe that most of the EU money goes to the corrupt, the migrants and the Roma.’ The success of Slovakia’s first major strike in the private sector since 1989 shows this is not inevitable.

Philippe Descamps

Philippe Descamps is editor in chief of Le Monde diplomatique. The assistance of Silvia Ruppeldtova and Milan Jaron is gratefully acknowledged.
Translated by Charles Goulden

(1‘Slovak Republic: strong economy offers opportunity to invest in the future’, OECD, Bratislava, 21 June 2017,

(2Eurostat, 30 March 2017.

(3Author of ‘Europe’s other periphery’, New Left Review, London, no 99, May-June 2016.

(4Radka Minarechová, ‘Many Slovaks still migrate for work’, The Slovak Spectator, Bratislava, 18 May 2015.

(5Smer-SD (Direction-Social Democracy) was formed as a breakaway from the Party of the Democratic Left (SDĽ, successor to the Communist Party) in 1999, and in 2005 absorbed the SDĽ, the Social Democratic Alternative and the Social Democratic Party of Slovakia (founded by Alexander Dubček in 1990).

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