Volume 8 Numbers 1-2

Winter/ Spring 1999

A Vladimir Meciar retrospective:

The End of Meciarism
M. Steven Fish

Slovakia'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 of Jean-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-democratic 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 political questions relating to authoritarianism, democratization, and political institutions?

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The anatomy of Meciarism

Meciar built more than a government. He created a regime of a particular type. In organizational and institutional 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 Europe—but continued nevertheless to profess support for integration. The party touted all things "Slovak" and propagated mistrust of nonethnic Slovaks. But its ideology—or nonideology—lacked the SNP's hard-edged, authentic xenophobia, with its hate-filled stance toward Hungarians and other ethnic minorities, its categorical opposition to Slovak integration into European institutions, and its commitment to reestablishing censorship of the media based on the "ethical" content of information.1 While the MDS claimed to favor capitalism and the market, in practice it turned privatization into cronyism, attacked the tradition of central-bank independence established between the demise of communism and the divorce with the Czech Republic, and endeavored, wherever possible, to replace market relations with antediluvian forms of patron-client exchange based on political loyalty.

And yet the MDS did not evolve into a "catchall" party. In Western democracies, most of what are dubbed "catchall" parties actually do have a distinct set of principles that distinguishes them from other major parties. They do not, in actuality "catch all" of the electorate, or the unclaimed ideological space therein, even in a loose sense. For this reason, the term has been the source of some confusion in the literature on parties. Still, the notion of a party with an exceedingly heterogeneous constituency and a flexible—albeit not shapeless—set of programmatic commitments, does accurately describe some parties in the Western democracies. But the MDS was not such an organization. By the time Meciar managed to personalize it completely—that is, by 1994 or so—it did have a distinct membership and constituent basis, becoming, in effect, a psychological brotherhood based on common frustrations and resentments. It combined roughly the same elements that are the mainstays of Gennady Zyuganov's Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) and Zhirinovsky's LDPR: those who have been left most vulnerable by the demise of the old system and who thirst most for the securities and certainties of the past; those who crave "strong" leadership by an overweening father figure; and those who see their problems as inflicted by foreigners and "aliens" at home.2 Meciar's techniques of popular mobilization helped personalize the party and "lumpenize" its base. Meciar's favorite means of building support involved bringing busloads of MDS supporters and potential supporters, mostly the less-educated inhabitants of small cities and villages from central and eastern Slovakia, into Bratislava for his own monthly political rallies. In these meetings, Meciar filled a stadium with up to 10,000 participants and closed it off to the media and other uninvited guests, though a handful of reporters usually managed to slip in. Meciar would harangue his audince for hours, treting it to a mix of vulgar humor and emotionl tirades involving tall tales of conspiracies that his opponents were hatching against him, including assasination plots. Meciar sometimes stired stired his audiences to a franzy. As the spectacle wore on, spectators who did not respond enthusiasticly were odten ( and frequently correvtly) suspected by other attendees of being unsumpatethetic journalists who had inflitrtated the gathering. Such individuals sometimes found themselves roughed up by Meciar enthusiasts. (3)

At higher levels, Meciar's policy of personalization and de-ideologization left the party so bereft of talent that even leading figures, including cabinet ministers, most of whom came from the MDS, became studies in incompetence. The ministers' reputations for ineptitude were developed in, among other forums, the monthly televised parliamentary hour, during which ministers fielded questions from parliamentary deputies. During the sessions, failure of various ministers to grasp even the basics of the problems that were their responsibility was often excruciatingly evident. The prime minister, on occasion, would rise from his seat, elbow the befuddled minister under questioning away from the podium, and declare that he would tackle the query himself, demonstrating that only he was capable of shouldering the weighty task. This reduction of even top government officials to a cadre of hapless lapdogs suited Meciar perfectly, underscoring his indispensability and superiority.

Such personalization of the party and even the government, however, worked at cross-purposes with Meciar's goal of partyizing the state. Meciar never sought the degree of penetration of society realized by communist parties under Soviet regimes. He aimed for long-term personal control and the right to rule with impunity, not totalization of society or political transformation. The model of the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party, in which a single party would run the state apparatus without sacrificing entirely the pretense of pluralism, appealed to him.4 But since Meciar reduced both the leadership and the social base of his party to rabble, the MDS ultimately lacked both the cadres and the political savvy needed to achieve a thoroughgoing and durable penetration of the state apparatus. He did attempt to force employees of many state agencies to join the MDS (or the SNP—sometimes they were given a choice). Many individuals lost their jobs for refusing, though reliable figures on those victimized by this policy are impossible to come by and may never be available. But such ham-fisted stunts could not and did not substitute for the creation of a capable, devoted corps of party stalwarts who could assume effective control of the top levels of the state apparatus. Nor could they compensate for the absence of a genuine ideology or set of governing principles, which, in new regimes, may provide enough motivational inspiration and social cement to enable even inexperienced and undistinguished cadres to control the state.

Thus Meciar's efforts to partyize the state never fully succeeded, even as he managed to disrupt the professional lives of employees of state agencies who resisted his entreaties. Meciar's approach and its consequences may be contrasted with those of another strongman in the region, President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia. Tudjman's willingness to tolerate the presence in his party, the Croatian Democratic Union (CDU), of talented and ambitious politicians, even at the cost of occasional intraparty disputes and challenges to the totality of his own control, left him with a formidable organizational weapon. His own and his party's stern and unwavering identification with Croatian ethnic nationalism, moreover—unlike Meciar's opportunistic, inconstant, and half-baked nationalism—provided sources of allegiance, identity, and cohesion within the CDU absent from the MDS. Tudjman's ideological commitment, as unsavory as it might be to liberals, combined with his personnel policy, which avoided reducing his party's ranks to a disorganized rabble and its supporters solely to his personal admirers, helped the CDU to penetrate the state apparatus in Croatia in a manner both subtler and more effective than could Meciar's MDS in Slovakia.

Meciar's attempts to personalize the party and partyize the state went hand-in-hand with what one leading Slovak political scientist has termed Meciar's efforts at "the general deconstruction of political and legal institutions."5 Meciar revived the successor to the old KGB-style organization (formerly the StB, now known as SIS) that had been restructured and subordinated to parliamentary control during the postcom- munist Czechoslovak period in 1990–92. He brought out of retirement many communist-era officials and rebuilt the political-surveillance apparatus but also took care that the organization's chiefs were under his own personal command. What is more, in his multitudinous efforts to intimidate and harass his opponents, Meciar often relied on hired gangsters rather than his secret police. The mugging and menacing of critical journalists and the bombing of their automobiles were characteristic of Meciar's coercive style.6 The mysterious kidnapping of the son of then-president Michal Kovac, in August 1995, similarly carried the stamp of Meciar's thuggery. Frantisek Sebej, a leading liberal intellectual who has long experience in withstanding the pressures of both the communist and the Meciar regimes, notes that Meciar's henchmen "are gangsters in the traditional sense." Such criminals, Sebej holds, sometimes acted at SIS's behest and were sometimes members of private gangs who answered to Meciar directly. Sebej's contrast of Meciarism's coercive style with that of the old regime provides interesting comparative insights. He argues: "The communists used the professional intelligence services to intimidate their opponents. They would, for example, shadow your car, and you knew they were there. They knew you knew, too. They would drop by your house and warn you. The communists actually had rules and even observed them. They informed you where the line was, and you knew when you were crossing it. You might even end up in jail. But the communists didn't have your car blown up or have you mugged by some thug. They were very repressive, but they weren't gangsters. Their style of control was completely different."7

In fact, Meciar's utter contempt for regular procedures, norms, and rules was not limited to the realm of coercion and control. It was the defining characteristic of his whole style of rule. Meciar reveled in arbitrariness and in breaking even those laws that he had made, or earlier acquiesced in, himself. There was an almost anarchical abandon in the manner in which he flouted and undermined established procedures as well as simple norms of decency. The "clock incident" provides a simple illustration. In late 1997, Meciar ordered that a large clock mounted atop a building—and visible from the office of President Kovac—be adjusted to display not the time of day but, rather, the number of days left in Kovac's term in office. The use of this clock to count down the days until the end of his despised opponent's tenure illustrated Meciar's penchant for the outrageous, but the specifics of the clock's adjustment showed his affection for flouting the law. The rigged clock did not display the number of days that Kovac had left in office, according to the Constitution (which measured his term from the day he took office), but rather the number of days he would have had left if his term were measured from the time of his election. Meciar insisted—in contradiction to the law—that Kovac must step down on the earlier date, even though the difference in time was trivial and made no difference whatsoever in substantive political terms. The clock served as a constant reminder to Kovac and all of Bratislava that Meciar's whims soared above the law; and Meciar indignantly refused to restore the timepiece to its proper function even when opposition deputies challenged his antics in parliament.

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Meciar's ochlocracy and other nondemocracies

Meciarism notwithstanding, Slovakia for the most part remained an open polity. Meciar was never able to impose fully the closure achieved by, for instance, Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbaev or Belarus's Alexander Lukashenka. One reason may be found in Slovakia's constitutional system (discussed below). The weakness of Meciar's external patron and the proximity of his external opponents also contributed to his failure. Meciar's major international patron was the Russian government, which provided cut-rate energy supplies and other props, including an open endorsement of his reelection. Consistent with the myopic realism that has guided its foreign policy for the past half-decade, Russia supported Meciar simply because the West did not. Russia's policy of backing anyone shunned by the West—Lukashenka, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and the Bulgarian Socialist Party are examples—has ensured that Russia's allies are limited to declining pariahs. It has deeply and needlessly antagonized many governments, and public opinion more generally, in the postcommunist region, from Mongolia to Bulgaria. Nonetheless, Russia's policy of decadent, aggrieved great-power nationalism, while self-destructive, did supply Meciar with an external booster. Still, Russia's deepening debility prevented it from acting forcefully to shore up its Central European client; its influence, moreover, was more than counterbalanced by that of the West. While the United States, the European Union, and the newly democratic states of East Central Europe did nothing to undermine Meciar's regime, they did make clear that Slovak membership in the major Western institutions would not come to pass with Meciar in power.

The very birth and persistence of Meciarism show that geography is not destiny. Being located in Central Europe did not save Slovakia from ochlocracy. But its location may have created counterpressures against the would-be dictator that were stronger than those endured by, say, the Belarusian or Kazakh rulers. Meciar's policy of de-ideologization also worked to prevent him from consolidating an authoritarian regime. While it helped him solidify the personalization of his party, ultimately it left him standing for nothing larger than himself. Tudjman's enduring popular appeal and electoral success rests, in large part, on his undiminished identification with Croatian statehood and ethnic nationalism. Lukashenka, for all his histrionics and inconsistencies, also stands for something real: square meals, wages paid on time, and other Soviet-era certainties. For much of the Kazakh elite and some of the population, Nazarbaev, despite his growing corruption and megalomania, represents interethnic quiescence and national self-determination in a vigorously multiethnic and still largely artificial country. Meciar's complete lack of a positive programmatic plan ultimately circumscribed his popular appeal and helped bring him down in the fall of 1998. By the time of the elections, his outrageousness and his unconcealed disdain for the law—themselves shaky foundations for maintaining oneself in power—had become his main source of identity.

Meciar's thuggish methods and thoroughgoing contempt for rules set him and the regime he built apart from various other forms of authoritarianism. Meciarism differs clearly from monocratic single-party and bureaucratic authoritarian regimes, insofar as rulers in the latter two types of systems, despite their frequent high-handedness, normally attempt to establish, and play within, some system of regularized procedures. The law may have nothing to do with protecting rights, but rulers usually take pains to maintain at least a quasi-legal basis and justification for their actions, and they do not, as a matter of course, disdain their own laws. Soviet-type socialism and South Korean and Chilean bureaucratic authoritarianism, with their exquisite attention to codifying repression and their use of regular, government-employed secret police or the armed forces for enforcing the regime, differ markedly from Meciarism. Sultanates, such as the Marcos regime in the Philippines or the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, or those found in postcommunist Belarus, Azerbaijan, Serbia, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, bear a closer resemblance to Meciarism in these respects. Despite some occasional pretense to the contrary, sultanic rulers normally demonstrate little interest in codification and regularization of rules and may often use irregular forces against opponents. Yet sultanates, like single-party monocracies and bureaucratic authoritarianisms, are closed polities. In this respect, both differ from Meciar's regime, which emerged in a polity that was—and, despite the ruler's intentions, remained—largely open. Meciar degraded the quality of Slovak democracy, as is reflected in yearly transnational surveys, such as those issued by Freedom House. But Meciar never had the strength to scrap electoral institutions, though he did push through sweeping and transparently self-serving revisions to the electoral law, in the spring of 1998, that greatly complicated his opponents' efforts in the fall elections. Nor could Meciar extinguish the communicative and associational freedoms that were born after the Velvet Revolution. He deployed thugs to assault and threaten journalists, such as those who worked for the country's best and most independent-minded newspaper, SME. But the paper stayed in business and continued to churn out material that did not flatter Meciar and his subordinates. Meciar completely controlled the main national television station, STV. But an alternative, private station, TV Markiza, managed to operate and to maintain significant autonomy, even as agents of the government tried, on occasion, to intimidate Markiza's employees. Slovakia under Meciar was, in short, an open polity run by antidemocratic thugs who were never really able to shut it down. Given the ruler's manner of governing and especially his contempt for the rule of law, Slovakia cannot be counted as a genuine polyarchy during the Meciar period; nor does it qualify as a closed, authoritarian regime. The broad distinctions sketched out here are summarized in Table 1.

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After Meciar

Meciar's fall and the accession to power of a coalition of liberal, social-democratic, and Hungarian parties in October 1998 would seem to spell the end of Meciarism. The opposition to Meciar always understood the September elections to be about the regime as well as the government. The newly elected mayor of Bratislava, Jozef Moravcik, who served as the prime minister in the short-lived government that preceded Meciar's return to power in 1994, remarked, in late 1997: "Everything is at stake in next year's elections. Step by step, Meciar is trying to create an authoritarian system in all structures of society. We realize it, and after we come to power next year we must change course in all spheres."8 Pal Csaky, former head of the Hungarian Christian Democratic Movement's parliamentary fraction and now deputy prime minister for civic and minority rights in the post-Meciar government, stated after the elections: "We are forming a government now; tomorrow we begin to change the regime."9

Yet however firm their grasp of the situation, its urgency, and the nature of the problem at hand, Meciar's opponents now face daunting tasks. Their main political challenge is maintaining the integrity of their new, four-party coalition government, made up of the Slovak Democratic Coalition (SDC), the Party of the Democratic Left (PDL), the Party of the Hungarian Coalition (PHC), and the Party of Civic Understanding (PCU). The alliance is potentially fractious, and all four of its components are themselves internally heterogeneous. The government's birth was contentious. At the beginning of negotiations on the government's formation, the PDL opposed the inclusion of the Hungarian Coalition in the government on the grounds that the Hungarians' loyalty to the Slovak state was supposedly not entirely reliable. By excluding the Hungarians, the PDL hoped to gain one or two extra ministerial posts for themselves and to pick up some support among MDS defectors. Protests from some local PDL organizations, as well as from fraternal parties in the Socialist International, prompted the PDL to retreat quickly, and the Hungarians were included in the coalition. Still, such transparently opportunistic and destructive behavior on the part of a major coalition party made for an infelicitous beginning. It also revealed tendencies in the PDL that do not bode well for the party's future loyalty to, and discipline within, the coalition. The new prime minister, Mikulas Dzurinda, who heads the SDC, did not demonstrate a great deal of forcefulness during the negotiations on the government's formation. Whether Dzurinda has the steel and shrewdness required to hold the coalition together, while launching major reforms, remains in question. In the absence of a coherent coalition, the new leaders will lack the ability to attack the organized criminal syndicates that Meciar nurtured and to dismantle the pillars of what Csaky rightly called "Meciar's feudal, pyramidal, political and economic system based on primitive reciprocity."10 What is more, Meciar's wild fiscal irresponsibility during his last year in power left the new government with an empty treasury, depleted foreign-currency reserves, and other potential precipitators of a profound economic crisis. Cleaning up Meciar's mess will require a reasonably unified coalition and formidable, disciplined leadership. Western and especially German support will also help determine the new government's fortunes. What is more, Meciar's ambitions are undiminished, and if the new government fails, the possibility of his eventual return to power cannot be ruled out entirely.

Still, the time of ochlocracy appears to have passed. The new cabinet is replete with able and intelligent politicians. Dzurinda has not yet proven his mettle in the corridors of power, but he is indisputably an intelligent, energetic individual who appealed to the voters' best instincts during the election campaign; there is nothing of the demagogue in him. Csaki is arguably the most talented and dynamic politician in Slovakia. The new minister of justice, i a coup for justice itself, is the intrepid Jan Carnogursky, one of the best known of the Soviet-era Slovak dissidents and the current leader of the Christian Democratic Movement. Several other new top officials, such as the wily and astute minister of the economy, Ludovit Cernak, served in the Meciar government in the initial years after the Velvet Divorce, before Meciar pushed virtually anyone with a triple-digit IQ out of his cabinet. The new governing team may be fractious, but an ochlos it is not. Nor does it speak for the ochlos. It represents virtually every portion of society that did not support Meciar and his MDS or the ultranationalist SNP. Indeed, its victory resulted in large part from a broad-based anti-Meciar social movement that emerged during the election campaign. The mobilization included the Rock the Vote drive, a spectacularly successful push by organizers in their teens and twenties to raise turnout levels among their peers, featuring a series of rock concerts throughout the country in the summer and fall.

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Lessons of the Slovak experience

The Slovak experience sheds light on several broad debates over institutional questions. First, it illustrates the possible drawbacks of excluding the electoral law from the Constitution. There may be good reasons to keep the electoral law out, since flexible rules governing access to public office may better suit rapidly changing polities than do rigid ones. But Meciar's "reform" of the electoral law just four months before the September elections, as well as the high-pitched uncertainty that prevailed for the entire year preceding the elections concerning how he would rewrite and manipulate the rules to undermine his opponents, did not serve democratization well. Meciar's ploy did not ultimately prevent the opposition from overcoming him. But it did greatly exacerbate uncertainty among political actors and the public. In the end, Meciar completely transformed the electoral system, introducing legal absurdities such as those that required opposition candidates from smaller parties to resign from their respective parties in order to stand for election in broader opposition blocs. Other rules had the effect of rendering the scheduled elections for local councils meaningless due to the enormous distortions in the way seats were to be apportioned. Had the electoral law been written into the Constitution, altering it would have required a three-fifths majority in Parliament, which Meciar did not control. Since the Constitution does not specify electoral rules beyond requiring a secret ballot, Meciar was able to ram through patently unjust and even ludicrous changes in the electoral rules by relying on a simple majority, which he did command.11

The example of Slovakia also speaks to the debate over the merits of parliamentary versus presidential constitutions for advancing democratization, though the lessons of Meciarism are not unambiguous. Slovakia is one of the few countries in the postcommunist world that both adopted parliamentarism and failed to advance to polyarchy. Does the Slovak experience undermine the proparliamentary arguments advanced by so many prominent political scientists?12 Or does it represent a unique case of parliamentary failure? In fact, it actually helps show that institutions that concentrate power, whatever their specific form, contribute to the stalling or reversing of democratization, while those that disperse power have protected democratic gains. Though often not recognized by contemporary students of new democracies—who have spent more energy debating where to concentrate power than how to disperse it—the theorists who provide the surest guide to understanding the effects of institutions on popular rule in the postcommunist world are Montesquieu and James Madison, both of whom knew that humans were good enough to govern themselves but not good enough to exercise unchecked power responsibly. A brief comparative discussion will flesh out the point.

Pure parliamentarism's opposite, superpresidentialism, has been a catastrophe for democratization everywhere in the region. Among countries that adopted constitutions that afforded presidents overwhelming authority, even those that made impressive initial gains and were led by presidents widely regarded as democratizers, political openings were at least partially reversed, subsequently, by presidential arbitrariness. Russia, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and, more ambiguously, Ukraine serve as examples. Countries that adopted constitutions ostensibly dividing power but containing ambiguities ambitious presidents could exploit for their own self-aggrandizement, such as Croatia and Albania, also experienced stalled or reversed democratization. Belarus's switch from parliamentarism to superpresidentialism spelled the beginning of the end of its democratic experiment. Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, each of which slid from Soviet-style rule to personalist autocracy, all invested overwhelming power in the presidency. Serbia's formal parliamentarism merely furnished a fig leaf of constitutionalism for a personalist dictatorship. And, in another variation, Slovakia's genuinely parliamentary system provided for an emasculated presidency while giving many ample opportunities for prime ministerial high-handedness, and Meciar proceeded to exploit these conditions in a manner that degraded the country's incipient democracy.

Countries operating under constitutions that disperse power, by contrast, have experienced democratization without authoritarian backsliding. Moderate presidential and semipresidential systems, both of which invest meaningful authority in parliament as well as the president, have served democratization reasonably well, as is shown by the experiences of Lithuania, Poland, Georgia after 1995, Moldova, Mongolia, and Romania. Most parliamentary systems have also promoted democratization, as in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Slovenia, Latvia, and (most clearly after 1996) Bulgaria.

Thus theorists who have touted parliamentary regimes and condemned strong presidencies are at least partially vindicated by the postcommunist experience. But the evidence does not necessarily support a strong version of the proparliamentary argument. Semipres-identialism and moderate presidentialism served Polish, Mongolian, Lithuanian, and Romanian democratization far better than parliamentarism served democratization in Slovakia. Nonconcentration of power has been more important for avoiding the continuation of or reversion to authoritarianism than has parliamentarism per se. The concentration of power—expressed as superexecutivism, of either the presidential or parliamentary type—has been democratization's most consistent antagonist. The virtues of parliamentarism touted by its advocates—greater representativeness and institutional flexibility, the absence of a powerful chief executive with a rigid, fixed term who views himself as a tribune of the people, and greater transparency of government operations—are indeed found in most postcommunist parliamentary systems. Still, Slovakia shows that pure parliamentarism, with an overweening prime minister, can lead to political outcomes disturbingly reminiscent of the interwar years. In contrast with the predictions of parliamentarism's apologists, no amount of prime-ministerial eccentricity or abuse of power sparked a movement against the prime minister by his party or coalition partners.

In most parliamentary regimes in the region, a Slovak-style super–prime ministerialism has not threatened democracy. This good fortune has been due in part, in the early years of regime change, to the presence of presidents who, despite the restrictedness of their formal powers, enjoyed formidable authority by virtue of their personal status as courageous opponents of the old regimes. President Vaclav Havel's ability and inclination to trim Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus's potentially autocratic ambitions helped keep democratization on course in the Czech Republic. Similar statements may be made about President Arpad Goncz's relationship with Prime Minister Jozsef Antall in Hungary, and President Zhelyu Zhelev's stand vis-à-vis a succession of Socialist-led governments in Bulgaria. Michal Kovac, by contrast, did not enjoy such extraordinary authority. His formal powers, moreover, were even more limited than those of most of his counterparts. He lacked any dissolution power, de facto possessed no real veto powers (the veto-override threshold in Slovakia is 50 percent plus one of all deputies), and he himself was subject to removal from office by a three-fifths majority of parliament.13

The postcommunist experience, therefore, shows that one of parliamentarism's greatest virtues for advancing democratization is also among the least commonly touted, or even recognized, by parliamentarism's own propagandists. It is that parliamentarism may—though it does not always—provide for enough of a division of power to help stay executive arrogation. Since parliamentarism is normally regarded—approvingly by its advocates—as providing for mutual dependence of executive and legislature power, the possible merits of its tendency, in practice, to divide power are rarely recognized. Where the parliamentary regime greatly concentrates power—as in the Slovak case, with its feeble presidency and all-powerful unicameral legislature—democratic institutions and norms may take a beating.

But the beating they take is unlikely to be as severe as it could be in superpresidential systems. While Slovakia's pure, hypermajoritarian parliamentarism opened opportunities for abuse of power, such opportunities were not as luxuriant as those furnished by superpresidentialism. As discussed above, Meciar was never able to assert full personal primacy over the polity or to emasculate electoral institutions entirely. Therefore, he remained vulnerable to defeat. An important counterweight to Meciar's ambitions was the vigor and tenacity of opposition political parties. Systems with powerful parliaments—be they fully parliamentary, semipresidential, or moderate presidential—have provided a far stronger stimulus to political party-building than have those with overweening presidents. Even in the absence of voting based exclusively or mainly on party lists (that is, proportional representation, or PR), parties have developed and matured relatively rapidly in countries with authoritative parliaments. Roughly half of all seats in Hungary are allotted according to territorial districts; Mongolia adopted an American-style system of pure district voting, with no party-list component at all. Yet these two countries have among the best-developed political-party systems in the region. Thus, while PR may advance party development, it is not necessary for it. A regime that includes a large role for the legislature—that is, a regime other than a superpresidency—is normally sufficient. In a system such as Slovakia's, with a parliamentary regime and PR voting, parties always mattered a great deal, and the incentives to build them were always strong. The development of reasonably vigorous multipartyism, which included major parties that opposed Meciar, guarded Slovakia's tenuous pluralism and helped it withstand Meciar's assaults.

In sum, the Slovak experience does not fatally undermine the proparliamentary argument; neither does it strongly bolster it. It shows that superexecutive power, always a bane for democratization in the postcommunist region, may take the form of prime- ministerial as well as presidential absolutism, though the latter is a much more common threat to democracy, since parliamentary systems have dispersed power, de facto, much more frequently than most theoreticians have recognized. But the Slovak case also shows that even pure parliamentarism with an overweening prime minister may create better prospects for pluralism and open politics, mainly via the fillip it provides to party development, than does superpresidentialism, under which the incentives for party development are usually weak or nonexistent.

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M. Steven Fish is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Research for this article was supported by funds provided by a Fellowship Grant from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, under the authority of a Title VIII Grant from the US Department of State. Neither the council nor the US government is responsible for its findings or contents.notes

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1. See Grigorij Meseznikov, "Domestic Politics," in Slovakia 1996–97: A Global Report on the State of Society, ed. Martin Butora and Thomas W. Skladony (Bratislava: Institute for Public Affairs, 1998), pp. 19–20; and Program of the Slovak National Party, Bratislava, 1998, pp. 11–13, 38–39.
2. "Volebny vyskum, 25–26 September 1998" (a study conducted by FOCUS and the International Republican Institute, Bratislava). I am grateful to Grigorij Meseznikov for helping me interpret the results (interview, October 21, 1998, Bratislava; all interviews are by the author).

3. "V. Meciar nebude rokovat s ceskymi pucistami," SME (Bratislava), December 5, 1997; "Udajne atentaty na Vladimira Meciara," SME, January 21, 1998.

4. See "Vladimir Meciar chce zmenit politicky rezim na Slovensku," Praca (Bratislava), February 27, 1998.

5. Interview with Darina Malova, October 7, 1997, Bratislava.

6. "Zapalenie auta Petra Totha je ulozene," SME, November 14, 1997.

7. Interview with Frantisek Sebej, October 8, 1997, Bratislava.

8. Interview with Jozef Moravcik, October 9, 1997, Bratislava.

9. Interview with Pal Csaky, October 21, 1998, Bratislava.

10. Ibid.

11. "Vsemocny stat," Pravda (Bratislava) May 21, 1998; "Komunalne volby nie su vykonatelne v sulade s Ustavou SR, uvazuje sa aj o ich odklade," SME, October 16, 1998.

12. For the proparliamentary argument, see Juan J. Linz and Arturo Valenzuela, eds., The Failure of Presidential Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); and Alfred Stepan and Cindy Skach, "Constitutional Frameworks and Democratic Consolidation: Parliamentarism versus Presiden-tialism," World Politics 46, no. 1 (October 1993).

13. See Sharon L. Wolchik, "The Czech Republic," and Patrick H. O'Neil, "Hungary," both in Postcommunist Presidents, ed. Ray Taras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Katarina Zavacka, "The Development of Constitutionalism in Slovakia," in Slovakia: Problems of Democratic Consolidation, ed. Sona Szomolanyi and John A. Gould (Bratislava: Slovak Political Science Association and the Fredrich Ebert Foundation, 1997).

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