BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — L’uboš Blaha calls himself a Marxist philosopher. A rising star in Slovakia’s center-left Direction-Social Democracy party (SMER), Blaha has adorned his office with busts of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Karl Marx.
But when it comes to the European migration crisis, Blaha displays little of the international solidarity espoused by his idols. “If Slovakia is to partake in the burden sharing of refugees, then the rest of the European Union should take in some of our 500,000 Roma in exchange,” he says.
In his country, Blaha’s views are not unusual. Few nations in the European Union have opposed a continental approach to the migration crisis more than Slovakia. The country’s rather untimely six-month presidency of the Council of the EU is coinciding with a period of resurgent nationalism and heightened xenophobia.
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico drew the ire of his European colleagues when he pledged that Slovakia will only take Christian migrants and, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris, vowed to monitor “each and every Muslim” in the country. He has also sued the EU over compulsory quotas for resettling refugees and promised to “never bring a single one to Slovakia.”
Slovak army and police forces ‘detain’ a man playing the role of an illegal migrant during a joint practice exercise at the border near Bratislava | Vladimir Simicek/AFP via Getty
It wasn’t just empty talk. In September 2015, the Council of Interior Ministers assigned Slovakia 802 refugees under the quota scheme. The government instead agreed to give refuge to 149 Christians cherry-picked from internally displaced camps in Iraq rather than relocated from Greece and Italy.
Fico was “brave and rightful” for defying the “acceptable discourse” says Blaha. “Marx’s greatest teaching is to always be realistic when it comes to problem-solving in politics,” he adds, glancing at a shelf-full of communist memorabilia and books penned by left-wing intellectuals. “You cannot have an open-door migration policy in a country where public opinion wants the exact opposite. Otherwise you’ll boost the fascists’ support!”
* * *
It’s not hard to see why the most recent string of terrorist attacks in Europe would heighten nationalist tendencies in a culturally and racially largely homogeneous country like Slovakia and other nations of the Visegrád Group: Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Walk through central Bratislava and you will only see white people — a striking contrast to other capitals in Western Europe.
Unlike Western European democracies with colonial histories, Slovakia has never been exposed to cultural exchanges with the rest of the world. “We are a small and ethnically homogeneous Christian nation,” Blaha says. “If multiculturalism is failing in places like Paris and Brussels, why should we try it here?”
Ahead of general elections last March, 80 percent of the Slovak public said they were against accepting any migrants into the country. And in response to the rise in xenophobia — in March’s parliamentary election, the neo-fascist Kotleba party won 8.4 percent of the vote — the government has increasingly adopted the rhetoric or the far right.
“Small states have to come to terms with big powers” — Josef Rydlo
“Refugees are seen as the new Roma, a community that is also experiencing a wave of racism in the country,” says Alexandra Malangone of the Human Rights League, which works with the U.N. refugee agency.
The problem, say the government’s defenders, is not with Slovakia but with the invisible, and intrusive, hand of the European Union. Even as the EU negotiates with Turkey to keep refugees out, its officials are quick to point a finger at similar efforts at the national level. “Brussels takes hypocritical stances towards us,” says Blaha.
* * *
The portrait on display in Josef Rydlo’s apartment, a short drive away from central Bratislava, is representative of a different pantheon from the busts in Blaha’s office.
Rydlo, a historian and former vice president of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee, is a member of the far-right Slovak National Party (SNP). And the man whose likeness he has chosen to grace his living room is Jozef Tiso, the Roman Catholic priest who lead the country during World War II, when it was a satellite state of Nazi Germany.
“He had to work with Hitler,” Rydlo says. “Small states have to come to terms with big powers.”
When Fico included the SNP in his first coalition in 2006, the Socialists & Democrats group in the European Parliament expelled SMER in protest. After a period out of power, when the party failed to get enough votes to enter Parliament, the SNP was once again included in the ruling coalition.
Unsurprisingly, when it comes to migrants and refugees, there is little to choose between Rydlo and Blaha. “Our greatest fear with the EU is that we might lose our national identity,” says Rydlo.
Rydlo was once a refugee himself — he fled from Soviet repression during the Prague spring and settled in Italy — but his experience has not made him any less skeptical of the prospect of multiculturalism in Slovakia. “The government’s Christians-only policy is sensible,” he says. “Muslims simply won’t fit in here.”
Davide Lerner is a freelance journalist, researcher and translator based between Brussels and Ankara.