the inspiration for the Czech Spolu was Ivan Šimek’s book “How we stretched our red noses and expelled Mečiar”, which describes the background and the formation of the SDK coalition in 1998, when, although the HZDS won the elections just before the SDK, it did not form a government and a fundamental political upheaval. When the relevant ODS deputy was telling us about it, I only noted this: “Just so you don’t end up like us in Slovakia”. I was referring to the final, ultimately unsuccessful sequel to the SDK Coalition.
It will remain a hypothetical question that if the parties KDH, DÚ, DS, Social Democracy and the Greens went independently, or the smaller ones would go on the candidates of the stronger ones and form a government coalition after the elections, whether such a grouping would not have more than 26.33 percent percent won by the electoral coalition SDK.
The important thing is that today, apart from the KDH, all these original parties have disappeared, and the architects of the SDK election project, i.e. Dzurinda, Šimko and Budaj, have nothing more fundamental in their hands today, apart from other political games.
A few days ago, a friend, a prominent figure of the KDÚ-ČSL, called me on the phone that the KDÚ was disappearing in the SPOLU coalition. In the last polls, it had 2 percent, and ideologically, the KDÚ parliamentary club is falling apart. This was shown with the law on marriage for all, when part of the club was against, part for, and the rest did not come to the vote. In the elections to the European Parliament, the KDÚ also plans to be in an electoral coalition with the ODS, although the ODS is in the European Conservatives and Reformists faction in the European Parliament, while the KDÚ is in the European People’s Party faction.
Before the upcoming early elections, Mikuláš Dzurinda came up with the project of uniting the center-right parties again. Of course, he counted on the basis that KDH would provide, with its still significant electoral potential, which should be expanded by Dzurinda’s emerging BLUE party and other parties. Ivan Šimko, as a long-time member of KDH, immediately publicly joined this project. In Denník N, I pointed out to these two political actors whether it was not enough for them that they had already broken the network of standard political parties. It was extremely wise of KDH chairman Milan Majerský not to join this project.
I am writing all this mainly because Ivan Šimko renewed his membership in the KDH after leaving the seat of the Minister of the Interior and gave an interview to the newspaper Postoj, in which he says that as a member of the KDH he wants to go into the campaign and in the long term he wants to support the aforementioned merger of center-right parties on Slovakia. I think that now is the time when the leadership of KDH should clearly say that it is not interested in such activity and should distance itself from it. As a supporting argument, it could be mentioned that during his political career, none of his long-term political visions came true.
If the KDH does not want to disappear, it has only one long-term perspective – to build a patiently conservative, professionally competent party that is based on Slovak roots and is open to all the good things that Europe and the European Union bring. In this respect, KDH is irreplaceable on the Slovak political scene. The upcoming elections could be a new beginning for this journey.
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