Marian Kotleba and the rise of Slovakia's extreme right

by Guest Sun Mar 06, 2016 7:10 pm

As Prime Minister Robert Fico begins the difficult task of building a majority coalition, there's shock in Slovakia at the real sensation of this election: the strong showing by Marian Kotleba and his ultra-nationalist People's Party-Our Slovakia.

Mr Kotleba made headlines when he won the 2013 regional elections in Banska Bystrica, where he now serves as governor.
The term "neo-Nazi" is often bandied about, at times foolishly, to describe anyone with views slightly to the right of Marine Le Pen.
But Marian Kotleba is different - he was, once, literally a neo-Nazi. Until recently, he dressed in a uniform modelled on the Hlinka Guard, the militia of the 1939-45 Nazi-sponsored Slovak State. He and his followers adopted the mannerisms, greetings, symbols and rhetoric of that state, Slovakia's first ill-fated flirtation with sovereignty. And make no mistake, the Slovak State was an authoritarian, clerical-fascist regime modelled on Nazi Germany. The Hlinka Guard enthusiastically hounded the regime's enemies, most of all Jews.

The Jews were disposed of under a unique 1941 agreement that was cynical even by the standards of wartime Central Europe.
Slovakia offered to pay Berlin 500 Reichsmarks for each Jew deported to Germany, as part of its obligation to send 120,000 labourers to Hitler, on condition they did not return.
And they did not return.
An estimated 75,000 Slovak Jews, 83% of the pre-war total, were killed in Nazi death camps, even after Slovakia's wartime leader Jozef Tiso reluctantly halted the deportations following protests from the Vatican.
This is the regime venerated by Marian Kotleba and his 13 newly-elected fellow deputies in his People's Party-Our Slovakia party. It's a regime he once described as "like living in heaven".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35739551

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