The hard birth of democracy in Slovakia: The eighteen months following the ‘tender’ revolution

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Abstract
Over the three years between 1988 and 1991, the Slovak capital Bratislava witnessed not only protests against the communist regime at the time of the ‘tender’ revolution, but also a range of demonstrations that reflected a history, culture and politics that is in many ways different from that of the Czechs. The eighteen months since the collapse of communist rule in November 1989 saw swings in public support between the newly emergent parties and movements, liberal, Christian and nationalist. The June 1990 elections occurred at a time when public opinion favoured the liberal democratic programme of the Public Against Violence more strongly than the increasingly narrow Catholicism of the Christian Democratic Movement or the separatism of the Slovak National Party. Since then a more inward‐looking and defensive nationalist tradition has gathered strength at the expense of the more outward‐looking, pluralistic tradition represented by the Public Against Violence which remains the one movement in Slovakia unequivocally committed to the kind of federal constitutional settlement preferred by the Czechs and to radical economic reform. Economic and political conditions specific to Slovakia have, however, made free‐market solutions less attractive, leading to a split within the Public Against Violence in the first half of 1991 and the establishment of the more protectionist and nationalist Movement for a Democratic Slovakia. The construction of a new order in Slovakia depends on creation of a balance between these various forces favourable to reform.

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