ABSTRACT
This chapter presents Slovakia profiles of longstanding democracies and of the European Union, and provides essential detail on history, electoral system, political parties and cleavages, and governments. Slovakia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and thus after 1867 most of its territory was under Hungarian rule. Slovakia elects its 150 deputies using a party list proportional representation system with the Hagenbach-Bischoff method. The major political party to form from the Public Against Violence was the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS), the clear winner of the 1992 election. In 1994 the HZDS government was brought down when more liberal members of the party left to form the alternative of political realism which subsequently became the democratic union of Slovakia. Slovakia has always had a clear polarization between on the one hand left populist governments led by first the HZDS and later Smer/Smer-SD with allied nationalist parties, and on the other hand broadly centre-right governments opposed to the former.
