There is an old Communist-era joke in which one character asks the other, “Why weren’t you at the last party meeting?” and the other responds “If I had known it was the last party meeting, not only would I have shown up but I would have brought a bottle of champagne.”  In a similar–if more [...]

 I should probably post something on the presidential election campaign in Slovakia, though there is not much to say, both because the race has been extremely stable and because I simply have not been able to find much polling.  FOCUS has not yet offered numbers and UVVM only started this month (as far as I [...]

I have written a bit about new parties and particularly those parties for which being “new” is a feature (as Allan Sikk calls it, “the project of newness”)–and will be writing a lot more about this–but I never imagined that a single party’s advertising campaign could capture almost all of the basic issues involved with [...]

The always unpredictable MVK has come in with new numbers for mid-December and so it is briefly worth revisiting the graphs.  The most interesting news from this survey, however, are the results for small parties that I do not cover here and will try to address in the next post. As we knew from the [...]

I was intrigued to see stories about a recent Fico appearance, particularly one in HNOnline entitled, “Fico: There is an artificially created impression that every politician is a thief.” How did that impression get created?  I have a partial theory: The points Fico raises in the article are not at all inappropriate:  Politics is hard [...]

August-November 2008 Poll Comparisions Trends and comparisons monthly report Although the overall figures for the last four months show little change, there have been some curious shifts in the polling numbers of various polling firms.  A graph of recent polling results for Smer from multiple sources shows in particular a sharp increase among Smer supporters [...]

November 2008 Poll Averages Overall Monthly Report: Continuity continued How many ways to write the same story.  While there are some interesting variations among polls (to be covered in the next post) the overall story of Slovakia’s party support remains astoundingly consistent.  This month takes the edge off of some extremes in last month, most [...]

Dissatisfaction with Slovakia’s current roster of pro-market, cultural liberal parties has produced yet another entrant: Liga-Civic Liberal Party: http://www.liga-ols.sk.  Liga-OLS enters an crowded field, one already occupied by SDKU as well as the smaller, non-parliamentary Alliance of the New Citizen (ANO) and Slobodne Forum (SF).     Liga’s proto-platform places it squarely in the same [...]

I saw the logo of the Conservative Democrats of Slovakia (KDS) for the first time today (apparently I live a sheltered life; or maybe it’s the party). My first thought was that it was a surprisingly attractive and iconic design for a party that seemed to take so long to get its act together.  My [...]