The biggest danger posed by the outgoing government was its willingness to subjugate and silence institutions that should, in a democracy, be more independent. Through a variety of mechanisms, the HZDS-led government silenced vital committees and oversight boards, including those in charge of intelligence, privatization and media broadcasting. In addition, to repeat the familiar litany, HZDS reduced the powers and resources of the presidency, eliminated the independence of individual members of parliament; ignored rulings of the constitutional court, and undercut the rule of the electoral commissions, and potentially much more.
The new majority can, if it desires, behave similarly. Thanks to four years of HZDS leadership, the rights of the political opposition in Slovakia are weaker than in most established democracies. Now with a constitutional majority, the next government could increase its power further by excluding HZDS and SNS from any oversight of important political, economic and security functions, and greatly limit their broader ability to participate in any discussions about the best future path for Slovakia.
These sanctions would perhaps be a fitting and satisfying punishment against a party that has for so long sought political hegemony between elections. Such sanctions would also minimize the threat that an angry and vindictive HZDS-led opposition will obstruct policy making and manipulate national symbols for its selfish partisan and economical interests. But if the next government is to ensure the democratic development of Slovakia, it must ensure that neither this, nor any future majority ever again rules with the arrogance and impunity that characterized the rule of HZDS, SNS and ZRS between the last two elections.
In practice, this is likely to be extraordinarily controversial. It means, for example, that the next government should guarantee HZDS and SNS proportional representation on all parliament-appointed boards and committees. Additional steps must also be considered with a blind eye to the question of who benefits. The powers and budget of the presidency, for example, should be fully restored--regardless of who occupies the presidency. The previous electoral law should also be reenacted--even though as incumbents, the next government could benefit from changes currently in place. And finally, elected regional governments should be considered as buffers against centralized control-even though many will be dominated by HZDS or its allies.
Self-interested generosity is based on self-limitation. An additional task is thus for Parliament to enhance the ability the Constitutional Court to check parliamentary power. This can be done if Parliament grants the President a more meaningful role in appointing constitutional court members (Under current practice, Parliament can assure its top 10 picks merely by choosing 10 others who are unacceptable to the President). Parliament should also consider introducing a system of staggered terms for constitutional court members. This will ensure that the entire judicial system is not the product of a single group of like-minded deputies.
The government must also limit its own ability to engage in economic clientalism. This means eliminating the option of following in the path of individuals in HZDS who made an art out of tapping the country's economic resources for their own personal and partisan advantage. Checks and oversight of economic decision-making procedures must be established wherever possible. Decision making must be as transparent as possible and open to allowing external review; selection procedures must be fair and competitive; and objective decision making criteria must be publicly made known at a reasonable time prior to any state choice. Once again, these steps will generously give the HZDS-led opposition greater rights and more information than HZDS ever gave its opponents while it was in power. But the measures will also reduce corruption in fact and in perception, improve the quality of government economic decision making, and set a path towards achieving greater respect for both public officials and institutions.
Observers who know HZDS well will wisely worry that the principle of self- interested generosity could be useless in the long run. Once HZDS regains power, they will argue, it will simply undo all that its predecessors have done. Recognizing this, additional safeguards need to be introduced. Thus, once a balance of institutional power has been restored; once the rights and responsibilities of the opposition have been reassured; and once transparency, competition and the rule of law have been reintroduced into the Slovak political economy, the government must lock these changes in place through its constitutional majority. This can be done by transferring the most important of these steps to the constitutional level, and by raising the threshold for a constitutional law from Slovakia's current low 3/5ths majority to the 2/3rds majority that is more common elsewhere in the world.
Slovakia's new majority needs to look ahead to the day when it will again be in the opposition. By adopting the principle of self-interested generosity today, it guarantees its own interests in the future. Self-interested generosity ensures that losing elections in Slovakia need not threaten the vital interests of the losers. It does this by limiting the ability of those in the majority to make changes that are catastrophic to those in the minority. And by establishing checks on the majority, it ensures that individual institutions have less power--hence people will fight less bitterly to win control over them.
The next government has really two choices: it can show some generosity toward its opposition now and in so doing, secure future generosity for itself. Or, it can continue HZDS's past practices of subordinating the democratic value of institutions to its own power concerns. Before it takes steps down the latter path, however, the next government should to think hard about the effects of its actions on the intensity of political competition and on the polarization of political society. Most of all, however, it must think about itself, the future and a time when they might need to ask for generosity from an incoming government that is not inclined to give it.