• Home /
• Statewatch Database /
• Slovakia: racism and fascism

Slovakia: racism and fascism

01 January 1991

Slovakia: racism and fascism
artdoc April=1995

General election gains bring extreme nationalists into ruling
coalition

Following Slovakia's general election, the extreme-right Slovak
National Party (SNS), having polled 5.4 per cent of the national
vote, has nine seats in parliament. The ruling Movement for a
Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) will now invite the SNS into its
ruling coalition. A pre-election supplement for the SNS, which
was inserted into a pro-HZDS newspaper, stated: `It is difficult
in Slovakia today if one is not a Jew'(Jewish Chronicle 7.10.94).

Bratislavia honours war-time fascist

Jewish leaders has described a decision by Bratislavia city
council to rename the city's square after Andrew Hlinka, the
Roman Catholic priest who spearheaded the drive for autonomy in
the 1930s which took Slovakia into alliance with Hitler, as a
`provocation and conscious effort to rehabilitate the fascist
past'. The Slovak paramilitary force which helped round up the
country's 90,000 Jews during the Second World War was named the
Hlinkaguard. Hlinka's face already appears on a Slovak banknote
introduced last year.
In the recent general election, the SNS vote was almost twice
the national average in Bratislavia where many of Slovakia's
Jewish community lives (Jewish Chronicle 7.10.94).

IRR European Race Audit, Bulletin no 11, December 1994. Contact:
Liz Fekete, Institute of Race Relations, 2-6 Leeke Street, London
WC1X 9HS. Tel: 0171 837 0041