What Is Happening to Slovak Democracy? And what can we learn about it if we look beyond parliament, government, and election results, and instead seek out the people who experience and shape democracy in their communities every day?
That is precisely the journey undertaken by Jeff Lugowe, an American podcaster who has long focused on politics and social affairs in Central Europe. During his time in Slovakia, he travelled across the country, speaking with activists, students, community organisers, researchers, people working in culture, and other representatives of civil society. He did not stay only in Bratislava. He was also interested in what democracy looks like in the regions, and what people shaping society from the grassroots can tell us about its state.
His journey resulted in the first season of the podcast Central Europe Matters, entitled Democracy Under Attack: Slovakia. The podcast offers a perspective on Slovakia through personal experiences and stories, gradually exploring themes that recur across different places and conversations: polarisation, a lack of trust, historical experience, civic engagement, and the determination of people who refuse to give up on the kind of society they want to live in.
Slovakia Cannot Be Explained by a Single Story
According to Jeff, he did not come to Slovakia with a story already prepared. Quite the opposite — he wanted to let the people he met show him what they considered important.
“I didn’t know what story I was going to tell,” he says in an interview we prepared with him for the EEA Civil Society Fund Slovakia. Gradually, however, he began to notice common themes emerging from conversations with people from different parts of the country.
One of them is polarisation and the lack of trust that comes with it — between different groups of people, between citizens and the state, but also towards the media and sources of information. According to Jeff, this lack of trust creates space for disinformation and conspiracy narratives while further deepening social divisions.
He also talks about historical experiences that, according to the people he met, continue to shape Slovak society. Communism, the wartime Slovak state, the 1990s, and later political developments have, in his view, left society with a great deal of uncertainty, fear, and unresolved historical trauma.
But his view of Slovakia is not simply a story of crisis.
Democracy Is More Than Politics
One of the strongest themes running through Jeff’s journey is civic resilience — people’s ability to organise, speak up, and do something for their communities even when they have little power, money, or public attention.
It was particularly in the regions, he says, that he met people who might not even describe themselves as activists. People who simply do what they believe is right: caring for their communities, organising their neighbours, revitalising public spaces, bringing culture to their towns, or creating opportunities for people with different views to meet and talk.
For Jeff, a strong civil society is not simply a collection of organisations. It is people’s ability to use their own power — to organise, create pressure, talk to one another, share experiences, support each other, and, at the same time, allow individual communities to decide for themselves what matters to them.
That is why he was surprised by how many young people he met across Slovakia who are actively trying to change their surroundings. “One of the superpowers of this country is that so many people care, and they do something with that care,” he says.
What Can Slovakia Show the Rest of the World?
Jeff’s perspective is particularly interesting because he is not looking at Slovakia solely from within. Throughout his journey, he sought to understand the country through its people and their everyday experiences, while recognising that numbers, election results, and political headlines cannot capture what it actually feels like to live in a polarised society.
Slovakia, he says, taught him that even a small country can “contain a whole multitude of worlds”, and that if we want to understand its democracy, we need to look beyond its political elites.
Perhaps that is one of the most interesting messages of his journey: democracy does not happen only in parliament. It is also about whether people can come together around a common cause, whether they care about the places where they live, whether they can listen to people they disagree with, and whether they are willing to take some responsibility for the kind of society they live in.
You can listen to the first episodes of Central Europe Matters – Democracy Under Attack: Slovakia on your favourite podcast platform.
Read the full interview with Jeff Lugowe, in which he talks about his journey across Slovakia, the people he met, Slovak culture, civil society, and what surprised him about the country, on the website of the EEA Civil Society Fund Slovakia.
