The Oligarchs’ Culture War: Why Slovakia’s Gender Law Is Not What It Seems
The culture wars came to Bratislava this week with parliamentary affirmation of the heterosexual family, gender essentialism and legislative ban on surrogacy engineered by the government of social democrat turned populist rogue Robert Fico.
Christian Democrats, ultranationalists and the post-communist left awkwardly united to grant the motion the necessary 90 votes for a supermajority with the fact Slovakia now claims primacy in social matters destined to echo throughout EU law chambers.
The move invited a barrage of criticism, funding cuts and lawfare from the European Commission with Slovakia vexed by two-years of attempted colour revolutions and oligarchic infighting since the return of Fico thanks to post-covid upheaval.
Drummed out of office in 2018 due to allegations of complicity in the murder of journalist Ján Kuciak and turning the country into a nepotistic playground, Fico is one of the most durable figures in Slovakian politics having nearly fallen foul to an assassins bullet last year.
Fico survives by maintaining some of the trappings of Soviet-era state socialism through balancing foreign capital, domestic oligarchs and workers through a rhetorical reliance on Slovakian nationalism when it suits him.
Both a NATO and eurozone member Fico’s government is fast departing from the norms of liberal Europe through state consolidation and overtures to not just Moscow and MAGA but Beijing.
As intended the gender ruling directly contradicts the principle of supremacy of EU law opening up a litigation pipeline between Slovakia and the ECJ.
Coming at a time when the Slovakian economy is under siege from climate directives and energy sanctions against Moscow, the gender policy of Fico facilitates a new battlefield by which to outmanoeuvre Brussels.
In this, Slovakia echoes Hungary and Poland in constitutionalising “national identity” to resist EU law with the combative approach under the guise of culture war rhetoric fuelling Bratislava’s schism with Brussels and NATO over Ukraine.
Instantly catapulting from Central European backwater to champion of family values in the eyes of the Trump administration Slovakia will likely use the move as currency in DC where understanding of the inner workings of Bratislava palace politics are barely known or cared about.
Puncture the surface and the actual fact Slovakia is a ramshackle,stuttering from crisis to crisis, oligarch to oligarch unsure of its purpose as a nation state project.
Unable or unwilling to confront the structural weaknesses of semi-peripheral capitalism and reliance on German car manufacturing, the oligarchic class in Bratislava seizes on “gender ideology” as a convenient wedge issue contra the EU.
For conservatives abroad tempted to see Fico’s Slovakia as a bulwark of tradition, (maybe even a left-wing conservative thinking outside of market logic) it is essential to grasp deeper realities that the Slovakian state (or the mafia clique of it in charge) is not animated by organic patriotism but by oligarchic self-preservation.
Diverging from their more market prepared Czech brethren since the 1990s, Slovakia’s political economy has been shaped by a carousel of “godfathers” who captured privatisation, siphoned EU funds, and entrenched networks through rigged procurement and patronage.
Thanks to the poor record of the first free PM Vladimír Mečiar instead of a broad middle bourgeoisie, Slovakia unlike the Czech Republic got oligarchs who built fortunes on insider access.
Marketed as a low cost alternative to Germany, from the 2000s onward, Slovakia reindustrialised around foreign direct investment, especially in the automotive sector with domestic actors grifting out existence through rent seeking.
Every government, whether reformist or social democrat, has been forced to negotiate with these entrenched interests with the retreat of liberalism and multipolarity creating conditions of a feeding frenzy as oligarchs gain the upper hand.
The basic law of Slovakian economics is this, productive sectors are foreign-owned; domestic capital mostly parasitic. Citizens learn that merit matters less than connections resulting in a combo of emigration and social rot. Think of the stereotypes of 1950s Ireland but true.
Even Fico’s foreign policy gestures reveal this double game. Outreach to MAGA, Moscow, or Beijing is not an ideological “pivot” but a bargaining chip: a way of pressuring Brussels for funds and prepping for alternatives as liberal hegemony further wanes.
When Slovakian oligarchs need German auto investment, the EU line is followed; when domestic legitimacy runs thin, nationalist rhetoric is dialled up. In truth, Slovakia is less a sovereign nation than a clientelist machine, wrapped in flags and icons. Culture war adds to this smokescreen by which oligarchs avoid confronting the true national crisis of depopulation and dependency.
Nationalists should be under no illusion: the young see through this arrangement as they do/did in Ireland under the gombeen excess of Charlie Haughey or failed corporatist project of De Valera.
Slovakia’s youth live the reality of low wages, outward migration, corrupt courts, and a suffocating patronage system that dresses itself up in ‘based’ Christian slogans today as it did in neoliberal jargon and social democratic assurances yesterday.
The risk is that against this doomed arrangement Slovakia’s youth will abandon patriotism altogether, drifting into liberal cosmopolitanism by default, simply because the “nationalist” alternative revealed itself as rot.
Brussels has drag queens and Maghrebi coke dealers but it also doesn’t have petty chieftains ruining your attempt at a normal life. Western conservatives and nationalists should comprehend that as Slovakian and Eastern European youth rush towards liberalism even with the warning signs of replacement migration and toxic social policy.
In of itself to be welcomed be mindful that Slovakia’s gender amendment is less a principled defense of civilisation than a diversion an ideological battlefield chosen precisely because it leaves oligarchic wealth untouched, Slovakia’s potential untapped.
A century or even a generation from now, if Slovakia’s oligarchy is not uprooted and its structural dependencies confronted, the nation will exist only as a depopulated transit zone for Chinese, Gulf and American capital to trod on as its human capital flees to Western Europe.
For Slovak patriots who long for genuine national renewal, this cannot be the endgame. The task is to build a free alternative one that strips away the oligarchic scaffolding and restores accountability lest the state at large slips into the Eurasianist abyss.