Slovakia

nation state

Slovakia  link Sourcewatch
Location	Europe
Type	nation state
Formerly communist country in Eastern Europe. Now a member of NATO and the European Union.

Slovakia is a country in Eastern Europe.

Regime Change 1998

In 1998, there was a regime change against Prime Minister Vladimir Mečiar. Mečiar and HZDS narrowly finished first in the 1998 elections, with 27% of the votes. However, he was unable to create a coalition, and Mikuláš Dzurinda from the opposition became the new Prime Minister. Afterwards, Mečiar was one of the two leading candidates for the first direct election of the president of Slovakia in 1999, but he was defeated by Rudolf Schuster.

In December 1997, National Endowment for Democracy arranged a secret meeting in Vienna Airport between Ivan Krastev, an Endowment-endorsed Bulgarian expert in non-violent regime change, and Pavol Demes, formerly Czechoslovakia’s foreign affairs minister. They discussed how to get rid of Mečiar. Demes, as a member of the Cold War-era Czechoslovakian dissident group Charter 77, had been in indirect receipt of NED funding for a decade by that point. He returned to Slovakia with almost $1 million in Endowment funding to establish Civic Campaign 98 (better known as OK'98), a coalition of 11 anti-government NGOs. OK'98 also received financing from the US Information Service, George Soros' Open Society Foundations, the German Marshall Fund, and the British and Dutch governments. While OK'98’s leaders claimed to be non-partisan, merely concerned with preserving the election’s integrity, hundreds of thousands of leaflets the organisation distributed across Slovakia told a very different story. One declared: "Like the majority of our fellow citizens, we feel a deep distrust in our government."

On election day, NED dispatched monitors from MEMO 98, an NGO aligned with OK' 98, to conduct a "parallel vote tabulation" (PVT), project the election’s outcome in advance, and publicize that data before results were officially announced. In theory, this was to prevent rigging, and Slovak authorities from tinkering with figures. As Hugo Turner pointed out, "However, the scope for abuse is obvious. Public suspicion and anger would inevitably be raised should a formal result differ from a publicized forecast, granting any opposition actors ample insurrectionary ammunition."

George Soros boasted:

{{#subobject: |Has superobject=Slovakia |Has objectClass=Quotation |Has author=George Soros|+sep=, |Has text=“"My foundations contributed to democratic regime change in Slovakia in 1998, Croatia in 1999, and Yugoslavia in 2000, mobilizing civil society to get rid of Vladimir Meciar, Franjo Tudjman, and Slobodan Milosevic, respectively," Soros boasts.” |Is about=Slovakia,Vladimir Mečiar, Franjo Tudjman, Slobodan Milosevic,Slovakia,Croatia,Yugoslavia,Open Society Foundations|+sep=, |Has wikipediaPage= |Has location=|+sep=, |Has publicationDate= |Sourced from= |Has sourceDetails= |Has sourceTitle= |Has sourceName= |Has sourceURL=https://web.archive.org/web/20101013003905/https://reason.com/archives/2004/05/01/temporary-doves/1/

}}

“"My foundations contributed to democratic regime change in Slovakia in 1998, Croatia in 1999, and Yugoslavia in 2000, mobilizing civil society to get rid of Vladimir Meciar, Franjo Tudjman, and Slobodan Milosevic, respectively," Soros boasts.”
George Soros

In 2000 Mečiar ostensibly gave up his political ambitions. His HZDS colleague Augustín Marián Húska said: "The NATO-War against Yugoslavia in 1999 was also a signal to us, to not pursue any vision of political independence anymore. We have seen what will happen to forces that want to be independent."

References