If anyone has a few extra bucks a moth, very few, it's really worth it to subscribe to WaPo and NY Times.
In Slovakia, February 2018 was a similarly dark moment. The country had been led by a populist government linked to corruption and organized crime. Jan Kuciak, a young journalist who tried to investigate those links, had been brutally murdered, along with his fiancee; there were dark rumors of official involvement. Mass street protests had persuaded the prime minister to resign, but it was hard to imagine what kind of language, what kind of political campaign, could possibly win over his party’s hardest-core supporters.
The surprise answer came from nowhere — or rather, it came from Pezinok, a small city in southwest Slovakia where Zuzana Caputova, an environmental lawyer and social liberal, had spent many years battling a landfill that would have polluted the air and water of the region. Angered by the murders, Caputova entered the presidential campaign in March 2018 as the candidate for the tiny Progressive Slovakia party. A year later, she won.
How did she do it? Caputova was in New York a couple of weeks ago, and I had the chance to ask. She told me that she began her political career by trying to understand why people were voting for a ruling party that had used anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner rhetoric as well as attacks on the media and “elites” to justify its hold on power. “People are afraid of the unknown, of changes," she said. "This fear is used by populists to come with very simple, very clear solutions.” But Caputova also noticed opinion polls showing that the politics of fear had another effect: “People are tired of conflict.” She resolved to “avoid heating up the discussions,” to offer not just her views but also the moral reasoning behind them. In televised debates, while the other candidates bickered, she came off as calm and measured.
Instead of feeding the enmity, she “tried to build bridges between people who have common values. ... I was very careful to try to find language that unites people and doesn’t divide them.” She also seemed different. Politics in Slovakia had long been a battle between egotistical men. Caputova sought to be the anti-ego alternative. She tried not to take politics personally, not to get angry and always remember, “it’s not about me.” She thinks that this distance, plus her lack of professional marketing — “young people are suspicious of it” — made her seem authentic.
And no, Slovakia is not the US, but people are people and most would rather live in peace and quiet than constant conflict.
= new reply since forum marked as read
