Some days Adrian Lachata ponders how life would have turned out if he had never left Svidnik.

The 32-year-old engineer would not have graduated from the most prestigious technical faculty in the Czech Republic, where he has lived for the past 11 years since moving from the industrial town in Slovakia’s northeast where he grew up.

Nor would he have met legendary Czech mathematician Zdenek Hedrlin, the subject of a book he is writing.

Most importantly, Lachata says he would not have expanded his horizons beyond the bitter resentments that make Svidnik a hotbed of populist discontent.

“Deep in their hearts, they are good people,” he said, sitting in a cafe in Svidnik during a recent visit to his hometown. “But their flaw is that they wait for someone to solve their problems instead of trying to solve them on their own.”

As Slovakia prepares to vote in May 25 elections for the European Parliament, the affairs of Brussels — or Bratislava, for that matter — feel a world away from this town a stone’s throw from the Polish border.

Earlier this year, the Svidnik district was the only place in Slovakia to vote in the majority for right-wing populist Stefan Harabin in presidential elections won by progressive newcomer Zuzana Caputova.

Harabin came third nationally, but in Svidnik his campaign struck a nerve with voters fed up with poverty, high unemployment and a sense of abandonment by urban elites. In the first round, he got 29 per cent of the vote in the town and 26 per cent in the district.

His was not the most radical campaign — that belonged to Marian Kotleba, candidate for the People’s Party Our Slovakia (LSNS), which many consider to be proto-fascist.

But Harabin got mileage out a platform that mixed praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin with diatribes against immigration. He also thundered that Slovakia was in the grip of a leftist revolution orchestrated by Brussels.

“Traditional or conservative sentiments have always been stronger in rural areas, but the source of Svidnik’s rebellion is really about economic fortune, not fear of an alleged leftist revolution,” said Mayor Marcela Ivancova, who defied the town’s populist leanings when she was elected as a liberal independent in November.

“People feel nostalgic about communism and marginalised by all the democratic governments, but it’s my job to convince them that populism is not a remedy.”

That is a tall order in a region with arguably more in common with populist strongholds in the hinterlands of neighbouring Poland and Hungary than elsewhere in Slovakia, where hunger for change has translated into progressive votes.

Presidential candidate Stefan Harabin speaks to the press after casting his vote at a polling station in March 2019. Photo: EPA-EFE/JAKUB GAVLAK

Vicious circle

With a population of 11,000, Svidnik is a sleepy town with post-industrial charm. The centre is full of buildings with socialist chic, streets named after pre-1989 heroes and memorials of Soviet soldiers, who liberated the town from German occupation in January 1945.

Some residents, like those living in an apartment building in Czechoslovak Army Street, get an even more palpable sense of history just by looking out the window: their yard is full of World War II military vehicles, including tanks and a plane.

The whole country, of course, has been shaped by the 41-year communist experiment that followed the war. But in Svidnik, it had a profound effect on both the economy and people’s way of thinking.

Almost totally destroyed during the war, the town was reborn under communism and became known as a key food and textile producer in Czechoslovakia.

A World War II plane stands in the yard of an apartment complex in Svidnik. Photo: Dariusz Kalan

Today, more than a quarter of a century after Slovakia’s emergence as an independent nation, it is the capital of one of the country’s least developed regions.

Factories stand idle. The town’s biggest employer is its hospital, with 343 staff. Roads are potholed and there is no railway.

Every year, around 100 people leave the town in search of work, according to Mayor Ivancova.

Some, like engineer Lachata, migrate abroad — to Prague, Vienna or London. Many move to the capital, Bratislava.

Living in cosmopolitan cities does not automatically make people more liberal — nor does it necessarily turn them into Europe-enthusiasts, Mayor Ivancova said.

“But many become inured to conspiracy theorists like Harabin and become more tolerant to strangers, with whom they have real-life experiences.”

For many of the people scrabbling to make ends meet in Svidnik’s working-class quarters, the European Union is a distant, abstract concept — if they think about it at all.

After all, EU money was supposed to reduce regional disparities. Instead, a system of clientelistic exchange is widely reported to have entrenched itself, with elite-friendly businessmen taking all the cream.

In Slovakia, scandals over the misuse of funds are so common that they have spawned a new word: “tunelovanie”, which means tunneling to siphon off money.

For Slovakia’s east, it is a vicious circle. There is no money for roads — like the long-awaited 4.6-kilometer bypass of the R4 expressway, now postponed until 2029 — so there are no new investors and no jobs.

And even Slovakia’s much-vaunted success in car manufacture fails to bring joy to Svidnik because the factories are in the west.

Mayor Marcela Ivancova looks into the camera in her office in Svidnik. Photo: Dariusz Kalan

‘Nothing there’

All over Slovakia, people want change — and Svidnik is no exception. The difference is that elsewhere it was Zuzana Caputova, an anti-corruption activist, who came to embody this yearning for a different way of doing things.

“Caputova made a terrible mistake not to come here during the campaign,” said Juraj Voloch, a 72-year-old lawyer who has lived in the town for almost half a century. “She didn’t even bother to post billboards and posters.”

In contrast, Harabin paid several visits, persuading residents that he could save the town — and the country too — from the allegedly corrupt elites whom many associate with the ruling party.

Eastern Slovakia has a love-hate relationship with the ruling Direction-Social Democracy (Smer-SD) party.

Economically to the left, socially to the right, Smer-SD has been in power for 11 of the past 13 years, and if anyone is to take the blame for the region’s underdevelopment, it is the party.

Between Smer-SD’s first parliamentary victory in 2006 and its latest win in 2016, the region has shifted only slightly in gross domestic product per capita — still far below all other regions.

Robert Fico, former Prime Minister and still the party’s head, famously lashed out at this part of the country, saying in 2018 that “the mafia can’t have interests in the east because there’s nothing there”.

Radovan Olejar, the owner of an IT company who co-founded Smer-SD in Svidnik, said that years ago Fico, then a determined young lawyer and compelling orator, was seen as a fresh face with new ideas, much as Caputova is today.

“And Smer-SD raised hopes as a different breed of a party: exciting, untainted by scandals,” he said. “But soon it turned out they have no interest in introducing real change.”

Olejar left the party four years ago due to what he said were the growing authoritarian tendencies of its leadership.

Yet Slovakia’s east has long formed Smer-SD’s most loyal support base. The party has won all its parliamentary contests by a landslide here. In the 2014 presidential election, 66 per cent of Svidnik voters backed Fico in a race that he lost nationally to independent Andrej Kiska.

Despite the government’s lack of investment in Svidnik, many residents still praise Fico for the hundred-million-euro programmes of social spending that became his trademark as leader.

These included, among other things, bonuses for pensioners, free school lunches and free train travel for children, students and pensioners.

“What I like about them is that this is the only party that’s able to maintain stability in the country — and that offers social contributions,” said a 17-year-old high school student who described himself a Smer-SD supporter, in contrast to many of his friends who back the far-right LSNS.

He declined to be identified, saying that “in Svidnik everyone knows everyone” and he did not want trouble.

Slovak President Zuzana Caputova. Photo: EPA-EFE/MARTIN DIVISEK

‘Iron fist’

Mindful of crimes committed on Smer-SD’s watch, including the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée, many in the countryside fear they will pay a price for liberals coming back to power and cutting off all the benefits.

They also fear political chaos like the sort experienced during an intermission in Fico’s hold on the office, when a chaotic, four-party centre-right government wielded power for two years until it was brought down in 2012 by a corruption scandal and internal squabbles.

According to lawyer Voloch, Fico has long been considered “a god” in Svidnik.

He added that local people appreciate three things: “social protection, which reminds them about good old communist times, Christian values and an iron fist.”

He continued: “What they want from a politician is to be strong: to come here, bang a fist on the table and promise that unsolved problems will be solved. That is what Fico was doing for years until he started showing signs of burnout, and this is what Harabin has done most recently.”

“We don’t care about the salaries of the European Parliament member,” says a billboard in Svidnik for the marginal Communist Party of Slovakia. “We want European salaries for the people.” Photo: Dariusz Kalan

Strikingly, anti-Roma racism was not a vote-winner this time. In a number of places in Slovakia, including many eastern districts, a promise to get tough on the country’s 400,000 Roma has long fueled neo-fascists and populist groups.

But Svidnik, to some degree, is a success story in introducing basic employment and housing programmes for Roma.

“They’re disciplined and make no trouble”, said a social worker, who declined to be identified, in the Roma neighbourhood near the town’s amphitheatre.

There are 470 Roma in Svidnik and around 70 per cent have jobs, he added.

Harabin was careful to avoid stoking anti-Roma sentiment in his campaign, so the source of his appeal evidently lay elsewhere.

It was not in his resumé. As former head of the Supreme Court and a justice minister in the first Fico government, he was, for decades, part of elite ruling class.

Rather, many say it was his personal charisma and good timing that earned him votes.

For the past six months, residents have been fuming at the closure of a maternity ward in the local hospital, which has been taken over by Czech-Slovak financial group Penta Investments. People took to the streets to protest, a rare sight in Svidnik.

The only presidential candidate who showed interest in the case was Harabin, who visited the hospital and chatted with staff.

In many ways, Harabin’s appeal echoed that of strongmen popular here in the past.

In addition to Fico, there was Vasil Bilak, a Slovak hardline communist leader who was born in the village of Krajna Bystra, 14 kilometers from Svidnik.

Then there was Vladimir Meciar, a nationalistic prime minister in the 1990s who offered an informal prototype for Viktor Orban’s “illiberal democracy” in Hungary .

“There is a common red line that comes from Bilak, through Meciar and Fico, and now Harabin seems to follow it,” Voloch said.

“They all gave the people a sense of being protected and promoted themselves as fathers of the nation, even if their actions contradicted that. In fact, they were more iron-lipped than iron-fisted.”

One of Harabin’s firmest supporters in Svidnik is Jan Vook, a member of the town council, who helped organise the candidate’s meetings with the local community.

Sitting in the gloomy basement of a coffee shop, he answered questions by throwing back questions of his own, mainly rhetorical.

“Just imagine an investor coming and saying: I will build a factory, but you must provide around 500 employees,” he said. “Where do we get them from, hmm?”

The long and short of his answer was a “Muslim invasion”.

Forty-something Vook is unequivocally critical of Europe’s post-1989 liberal democratic order. He is also deeply nostalgic about communism.

“What was evil about it?” he said. “That people have a roof over their heads? That women were motivated to give birth? That the nation and family were in first place? And what do we have instead now? Peanuts and bananas in the shops, but young people can’t afford an apartment.”

Asked about journalist Kuciak, whose brutal murder last year triggered mass protests in many places in Slovakia — but not in Svidnik — Vook shrugged.

“It was a tragic event, but how many similar events do we face every day?” he said. “I want to ask: what is the result of these demonstrations? They forced the resignation of the government and we’re in even worse chaos than before. Who paid for these demonstrations?”

Behind Vook’s conspiracy theories is a sentiment you hear often in eastern Slovakia: that other parts of the country look down on the region. It is a sore point that populists artfully poke.

One word sums this up: “vychodniar”. Meaning “man from the east”, it describes someone temperamental, proud and canny but whose main quality is not necessarily erudition.

“Sure, we don’t earn as much money as people in Bratislava,” businessman Olejar said. “But we have the same right to education, justice and high-quality health care. Whatever they think, we’re not second-class people.”