The Chalk Revolution: The Failure of Liberal Protest Against Proto-Authoritarian Regimes in the post-Cold War era

“Dost bolo Fica” (Enough of Fico) has been a slogan I’ve chanted countless times over the last couple of years. Standing at the Freedom Square in the center of Bratislava, surrounded by 15 thousand people, listening to speeches by students, who I would end up later fraternising with right here in Amsterdam, I believed change would come. How could it not? We protest, we vote, we “fight” against the inept leadership of Robert Fico and yet we fail. The numbers at the protests peter out, students end up dragged from school to be questioned, and Fico remains snuggled in Vladimir Putin’s lap. 

In contrast to what the title of this piece suggests, in recent polls the main Liberal party of Slovakia, Progresivne Slovensko (PS), leads with a fair margin of nearly five percent. The next three parties are all right-wing populists. One (Republika), which is a neo-nazi party whose current leader is a man who told a fellow EU parliament member to “shut your mouth” and whose former leader was an avid conspiracy theorist, often seen dressed in Nazi uniforms. Unless PS is able to secure a massive blowout victory, it will fail to form a coalition.This would not be the first time a liberal government has failed to implement any real change despite overwhelmingly winning. Back in 2020, Igor Matovic, who is populism in a man’s body, won on promises of anti-corruption and change. He, fairly predictably, failed to deliver on said promises and, within a year, stepped down as Prime Minister only to be replaced by Eduard Heger, a man whose title was purely nominal. While the concept of Liberalism in Slovakia is fairly young, the struggles are worrying, to say the least. The question now is, “How do we stop ourselves from sinking too deep?

Mier Ukrajine has been one of the primary forces of, in my view, classic Western liberalism in Slovakia. At protests, anti-communist sentiments are rampant, witty posters are a highlight, and outrage is minimal. A real picture of what I imagine American protests against Donald Trump are like. Albeit replacing the classical American unseriousness with a sense of liberal Slovak nationalism, a sentiment which, to be perfectly honest, I’ve grown fairly fond of. But even when I feel this sense of nationalism, this hope is within arm's reach. When the feeling eventually wears off, all that remains is this feeling of political apathy. The apathy that comes with not being surprised anymore when Fico goes to schools to scold students, tells them to “go and die in Ukraine if they care so much”, tells them how we foster a culture of violence because someone “has a different opinion”, and most importantly, replaces them with his lackeys once they leave. How can drawings and gatherings be enough? When your enemy does not derive his power from the consent of the governed, when they refuse to show any care for the wants and needs of their citizens, the solution lies in revolt.

Often, people joke about how my political ideas lie in violence despite never being confronted with it and living a relatively pampered lifestyle. While I do agree with them, they view my comfort in the current state as something I will grow to appreciate as I age, and that my belief in a revolution is something every university student studying Political Science goes through. However, I see students my age talking about how communism is “a horrible disease that corrupts and destroys people” without understanding what communism really is (or socialism for that matter, but at the risk of sounding like a Twitter political commentator, I won't elaborate on that). This is something unique to Slovakia and former Eastern Bloc countries, as even the most liberal or leftist, in a sense, people I have met have all despised any interest in communism, or, in the words of Emily Blunt's character in Oppenheimer, even an “intellectual interest in communist ideas”.

We have been so detached from the concept of genuine leftist thought by Western liberalism, and those in our country who call themselves socialist while only being Russophiles, that we can not comprehend anything beyond peaceful liberalism as beneficial for us. We complain about grocery store prices and point fingers at the government and not at the corporations which lobby our leaders. We buy cars and complain that public transport is too unreliable, without asking ourselves who benefits. We claw at each other's necks come election time, even though the left-leaning party will not liberate us from ourselves, because only we can do that. When 50 thousand people stand in the rain, protesting our government, and a week later, we forget, did the protest even happen? If hundreds of thousands of people across the country proclaim their disgust with our government week by week, why does it still hold power?

These questions remind me of the 17th of November 1989. The day students and citizens across Czechoslovakia took over the streets of Prague, Bratislava, and many others in hopes of freeing themselves from Soviet control. The jingling of keys has become a show of resistance since then, even being done to Robert Fico at his infamous scolding session in Presov last week, a symbol of never again subjugating to foreign domination. Yet, those same people tout Western Liberalism as a savior from the socialist East. “We must be more like the West” is a common theme amongst liberals in Slovakia. They believe the West helped us in 1989 and will help us now. But what they forget is, it was not the Germans, or the Brits, or god forbid even the Americans, on the streets in 1989, it was us. We fail to understand that their peaceful protest worked not because it was a form of primitive Western Liberalism, but because we were united. And we have hardly been united since. Authoritarianism is how we have lived for hundreds of years, and the illusion of freedom under a liberal government does not dismantle it, but rather obscures it.

I grew up understanding what fascism is through textbooks. While it is easy to read and study fascism, seeing fascists in person carries a different weight. It is easy to say that we must educate and not fight, while not educating and further radicalizing. But I find it ridiculous that we have somehow managed to paint the killings of far-right and pro-authoritarian leaders and promoters as “evil” and murder. The death of Charlie Kirk was a prime example of how liberalism is really a right-wing ideology. If one were to celebrate his murder, or even poke fun at it, they were ostracized, painted as a pro-violence idiot who is not a person. And not only by the right, but especially by the left. Think back to the backlash Jimmy Kimmel received, having his show cancelled for fairly light comments criticizing Trump’s response to

Kirk’s death. While it was the Trump government which applied pressure for the cancellation, the American liberal movement aided and abetted in the increased public pressure to condemn any negative reaction to Kirk’s death, which is ironic as one could be forgiven for thinking Liberals find the genocide against the Palestinian people less vile than the celebration of the death of a man who believed some gun deaths are necessary for the right to bear arms, even though the leading cause of death in children in the United States is firearm injuries. When your enemy's opinion is that you do not deserve the same rights as him, whether that be the right to marry who you choose or even the right to live (ironically), you either kill or get killed.

Although the sentiments expressed seem drastic or harsh, they hold an uncomfortable truth. All in all, the Chalk Revolution was a failure. The student who started it had his 15 minutes of fame, sang his song at a protest, and the next day, nothing changed. The polls still show a hard path forward for the liberals, Republika grows in influence by the day, but at least we did our drawings. All we have to show is that we have sternly condemned the men who are destroying our country and continue to destroy it, while we sit in the corner and shake our heads disapprovingly. The problem of the now pro-establishment liberals is their inability to enact any meaningful change while yelling about how unfair everything is. One could be forgiven for falling into populist discourse these days. And yet they can't be.