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8 E. Eur. Const. Rev. 47 (1999)
The End of Merciarism

handle is hein.journals/eeurcr8 and id is 47 raw text is: Special Reports A Vladimir Meciar retrospective The End of Meciarism M. Steven Fish s lovakia's postcommunist and postindependence political experience has been characterized by a phenomenon unique in East Central Europe: ochlocracy, or rule by the rabble. For nearly a half- decade, leading up to the parliamentary elections of late September 1998, Slovakia was governed by a coalition of misanthropes and harlequins, headed by a politically wily but mentally unbalanced prime minister, Vladimir Meciar. From 1994 until 1998, Meciar lorded over a parliamentary coalition consisting of his own Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (MDS), a party as misnamed as Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR); a small, extremist communist party, the Association of Workers of Slovakia (AWS); and the Slovak National Party (SNP), an organization whose fascist stripes are set in bolder relief than those ofJean- Marie Le Pen's National Front in France. Until the fall 1998 elections defeated their coalition, these three parties controlled 82 of the 150 seats in Slovakia's all- powerful unicameral national legislature, and they relegated the liberal, confessional, and social-demo- cratic parties to political impotence. Meciar established a regime based on thuggery, incompetence, and contempt for the law. What was Meciarism? What will follow it? What does the Meciar experience reveal about broader polit- ical questions relating to authoritarianism, democratization, and political institutions? The anatomy of Meciarism Meciar built more than a government. He created a regime of a particular type. In organizational and insti- tutional terms, Meciarism was characterized by personalization and de-ideologization of the party and by partyization of the state. Personalization of the MDS, which had its roots in the Public Against Violence, involved a process of encouraging or forcing the departure from the party of nearly all of the many capable-and in many cases, liberal-members who had staffed the organization's ranks in its formative years. It also included recruiting a new mass of mostly poorly educated and economically marginalized people who were attracted to the party exclusively ,by their loyalty to Meciar himself. By 1994, most of the organization's original leaders had quit. This slow- motion coup enabled Meciar to assert full control and eliminate potential rivals. Personalization went hand- in-hand with de-ideologization. If the party was to be completely personalized, it had to be stripped of any genuine ideological or programmatic content that could constrain the leader, constitute a standard against which his performance could be judged, or serve as an alternative source of loyalty and motivation. By mid- decade, the closest thing that the party had to a set of principles was an amorphous, eclectic, and deceitful antiliberalism. The party worked to sabotage Slovak integration into European institutions-Meciar correctly perceived himself as utterly unacceptable to WINTER/SPRING 1999 47

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