Slovakia Says 'No, Thanks' to Shock Therapy

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia -- Turkeys, even rather stupid ones, do not generally vote for Christmas. In the same way, one cannot really blame the majority of Slovaks for having rejected a Western-prescribed course of high-pressure economic reform in their Sept. 30 to Oct. 1 parliamentary elections.


What the Slovaks did -- or, at least, 35 percent of them -- was to vote for Vladimir Meciar and his populist, nationalist, anti-reformist Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, or HZDS. Meciar and the HZDS were the big winners in the elections; no other party scored even 11 percent. The message was clear: Slovaks do not want a "shock therapy" transition to capitalism, on the Polish or Russian Gaidar model, because they fear the price would be too high in terms of unemployment and insecurity.


And who can blame the Slovaks? The fact is that the Slovak economy is in no way comparable to the economies of Poland or the Czech Republic, where the switch to free markets is going ahead at full steam. Before the communists took over former Czechoslovakia in 1948, Slovakia was a sluggish, mainly agrarian backwater.


In their bungling wisdom, the communists filled Slovakia with a clump of smoke-belching heavy industries, and also turned the republic into a major producer of tanks, guns and other death-dealing equipment that no one wants to buy these days.


Speedy economic reform in Slovakia would mean closing factories, throwing hundreds of thousands of people out of work, and suffocating entire communities. It means this, too, in Poland and the Czech Republic. But in Slovakia it would happen on a far more serious scale. Signing up to full-blooded free enterprise simply isn't an option for any rational Slovak government. That is why I despaired when I read the headlines in Western European newspapers following the Slovak election results. Without exception, they characterized the vote as a severe setback to reform in Eastern Europe. Well, in a sense it was, but that is like rebuking a lobster for declining the chance to be sizzled alive.


We should remember one thing. In Poland's elections in September 1993 and in Hungary's elections last May, former communists, now posing as well-dressed progressive democrats, were returned to power. In Slovakia, this did not happen. Slovakia's voters did not pick former communists to extract them from the mire.


Instead, they chose Meciar, a former boxer who has already been prime minister twice before. Certainly, Meciar, 52, is an unappealing character, prone to exercise power in a bullying, sneering fashion. He has adopted an unashamedly hostile stance toward Slovakia's ethnic Hungarians, who make up almost 11 percent of the population, and he has threatened to turf out of office the eminently reasonable head of state, Michal Kovac.


However, Slovaks who justifiably fear the consequences of reform had no choice but to vote for Meciar. He was the only politician who used the election campaign to address effectively the real concerns of the people.


It is a tremendous irony that all the high-minded Westerners who embraced the cause of Eastern Europe's freedom in the Cold War now turn around and say they don't like the choice that Slovaks have made in a free election. Frankly, the West has a lot to learn about the specific conditions that apply in each former communist country, Russia included.