It’s been 35 years since riot police in Prague suppressed a student demonstration, kicking off the extraordinary 12-day Velvet Revolution of 1989 that ended communist rule in Czechoslovakia.
How difficult it is now to convey the reverence that Czechs and Slovaks felt for democracy back then.
Not everyone was a fan, to be sure: The country was full of appalled apparatchiks and stunned spooks who had just been canceled overnight.
But for the crowds who massed in freezing Prague and Bratislava to hear speeches and jingle their keys — a gleeful, “time-to-go” signal to the comrades — the mere idea of democracy and of the liberal West moved people to sing with gratitude in their thousands.
More than a generation later, in 2025, those earnest hopes seem fustily quaint. Former Communist Party member Robert Fico is now in his fourth term as prime minister of independent Slovakia. Meanwhile, in Czechia, Andrej Babiš — who also served in the Communist Party and even with Czechoslovakia’s ŠtB state security — is on track to return to the premiership in fall 2025 elections, with his populist ANO party running above 35 percent in the polls.
It’s no longer enough to say, as democratic apologists once lamented, that voters feel nostalgic for communism. The problem is far more grave: A critical mass of people now believes that liberalism, the purported alternative, was always mere cynical performance art — allowing Washington and Brussels to grab power in Central and Eastern Europe after Moscow was forced to relinquish it, with corporations replacing collectives and hamburgers pushing out halušky (potato dumplings).
So, how did democracy go bankrupt? In Slovakia, at least, there may have been an actual moment.
The emperor loses his clothes
The West was frequently enlisted in support of Slovakia’s fledgling democracy in the 1990s when its pugnacious prime minister, Vladimír Mečiar, was busy getting his country dropped from NATO and European Union membership short lists and signing energy deals with Russia’s Gazprom. Then-United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright infuriated the Bratislava regime by calling Slovakia “a black hole in the heart of Europe” in 1997; in elections the following year, Mečiar was ousted by Christian Democrat Mikuláš Dzurinda and his pro-democracy coalition.
Dzurinda’s government brought Slovakia back from the dead in many ways — into NATO and the EU, and from corruption backwater to the region’s neoliberal poster child — but it also left thousands behind, mostly those who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) use a computer, learn yet another language, or trade their village home for a bunk in a Bratislava high-rise.
