With a mobster in government – Denník N

It was a mistake to add Boris Kollár to the governing coalition. But once Igor Matovic had done it, he could have mitigated its social consequences by declaring, “I’m going to rule with the mobster, because it’s in the higher interest of democracy and justice.” Kollár might not be offended. And Slovak voters of democratic parties might note that if they want to have their own government, there will always be a mobster in it, because there will never be enough of them.

In our modern history, governments made up of democrats alone are the exception. The only “clean” one was the government of Iveta Radičová, which after a short time was laid down by Richard Sulík (with the help of Matovič). All the others were more or less forced to gain undemocratics. In the first government of Mikuláš Dzurinda sat the corrupt post-communists (SDĽ) or the populist SOP of Rudolf Schuster, in the second the impostor Pavol Rusko and his ANO. And in the 2006 election, Dzurinda tried to get Vladimír Mečiar to his side, but was overtaken by Robert Fico.

So much for the hope that in Slovakia we will live a purely democratic, uncorrupt and even viable government. Our proportional electoral system is fair in that the outcome of the elections accurately reflects the attitudes of society. Its disadvantage is broad and fragile coalitions, where moral relativism is a condition for them to emerge at all.

Hypocrites

The problem is not that such governments are being formed, but in the hypocrisy of politicians and their constituents. A democratic politician who takes a mobster or a fraudster to the government should explain to the public that he is doing so in the best interests of the country’s democratic future and that he is taking responsibility for this immoral act. His constituent might then appreciate that he himself can remain moral because of this, because the politician has defiled himself for him and for a higher interest.

The problem is that politicians – from Dzurinda to Matovic – hypocritically praised their governments as models of democracy and, by not admitting to moral relativism, forced their constituents to be hypocritical. They made them accomplices. No wonder they are then outraged and heal their moral monkey on social networks by moralizing.