Abstract
Given the fact that only two relevant parties in Slovakia since 1993 have managed to replace their leaders and maintain their relevance, the role of personality traits in the rise and success of party leaders in Slovakia is an especially important topic. Therefore this chapter focuses on two party leaders—Robert Fico and Mikuláš Dzurinda—who are closely tied to more than two decades of political development in Slovakia during 1998–2019. They both managed to utilize their high level of personal popularity to reach the party leadership and via electoral success achieve intra-party cohesion and increase the membership in their parties. However, while Fico relied on his public popularity for another decade after becoming Prime Minister for the first time, Dzurinda gave up on building the popular public image and focused on managing his heterogeneous coalitions. Fico’s SMER thus remained an internally homogeneous party (to an outside observer) for as long as Fico was the most popular politician in Slovakia, while Dzurinda’s SDKÚ was completely marginalized because Dzurinda was not willing to step down as chairman, despite his decreasing public support and increasing criticism from inside the party.
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Notes
- 1.
Fico withdrew his candidacy shortly before the election.
- 2.
SDK was effectively transformed into SDKÚ which de jure is a different actor, but de facto is a direct successor of SDK.
- 3.
Part of the increase in the party membership is a result of mergers with other leftist and left-leaning parties.
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This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (GA18-15700S).
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Nemčok, M., Spáč, P. (2020). The Rise and Sustainability of Party Leaders in Slovakia: Robert Fico and Mikuláš Dzurinda. In: Gherghina, S. (eds) Party Leaders in Eastern Europe. Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32025-6_11
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