A significant growth of extremism was a phenomenon not only in the Czech Republic but also in Slovakia in the early 1990s. Part of the population saw it as the opposite of communism and therefore quietly tolerated it; part of the population understood freedom as an unlimited possibility to express hatred towards minorities and everything was fed by political rhetoric. This was particularly loud in Slovakia. It was not only the nationalist Slovak National Party and other disingenuously far-right extremist entities that incited the population against the Hungarian minority and the Roma. Vladimír Mečiar himself rode the wave of hatred. Not only because of this, the seemingly sociological problem was also a problem in terms of corruption.
Nationalism to extremism helped Mečiar come to power and subsequently keep a massive corruption regime alive. To distract attention from the constant theft of state property by those around him, Mečiar covered everything with emotion, which he encouraged mightily. Since 1993, he has not shied away from attacking Czech politicians. However, he has fed his resentment towards the Hungarian and Roma minorities even more strongly. From the beginning of his reign, he promoted a ban on the use of the Hungarian language in schools (this ban was broken only in 2008 – only since then has the use of historical Hungarian names of towns and villages or Hungarian names been allowed in textbooks). When parents of Hungarian-speaking children protested against the discriminatory tendencies of Mečiar’s government, he branded them extremists. Mečiar also started several nationalist traditions, such as lighting the “torch of sovereignty”. In later periods, the neo-Nazi community around Marian Kotleba was formed on this nationalist gesture, but Robert Fico and the members of his governments also lit the sovereignty torch.
Looking vertically, the power structure of extremism was spread to all levels of society. Sympathy for neo-Nazism was expressed by street vandals as well as by well-known personalities and politicians. Many of the Slovak mafia groups recruited “foot soldiers” precisely among right-wing extremists. However, the security forces also acted in a similar way. International organisations and the NGO sector sounded the alarm that this was why there was a massive increase in the number of attacks on citizens because of hatred of another race or nationality.
In practice, it seemed that more than one case of assault by a neo-Nazi was assigned by a local police director sympathetic to extremism to another neo-Nazi – only within the ranks of the police. Even if, exceptionally, the case did make it to court, it ended up on the desk of another sympathiser who, moreover, was using legislation that was completely unprepared in that area. Criminal groups have also often taken advantage of this, using their links to the power structures to attack Roma, Albanian or Hungarian tentacles of organised crime on Slovak territory. To put it simply, when cities like Bratislava or Košice were experiencing several hate attacks a week, it was easy to hide mafia settlements in this often uninvestigated mass of cases.
