Winner loses all

"Robert Fico won, but he's finished," comments SME. The Slovak elections on 12 June had the same paradoxical outcome as the recent Czech and Dutch elections: the winner doesn't really win. Although SMER, the party of the incumbent prime minister, garnered nearly 35% of the vote, in all likelihood it won't be able to form a new government. The Bratislava-based daily predicts "the new prime minister will probably be Iveta Radičová". The centre-right SDKÚ-DS party she leads will form a coalition government with three other parties, including MOST-HID, a multiethnic formation made up of both ethnic Hungarians and Slovaks. For the Czech weekly Respekt, "Slovakia's great victory", which it calls an "historic moment", is the defeat of Vladimír Mečiar's nationalist party. Former prime minister Mečiar, who isolated the country in the 1990s and fuelled the conflict with ethnic Hungarians, has been ousted from parliament for the first time since the nation's first democratic elections in 1990. To be sure, as Respekt points out, nationalism and populism have not been utterly vanquished, but "the elections show that the country has the capacity to regenerate itself and that people are protecting democracy".