I Ignored Your Revolution, but You Forgot My Anniversary: Party Competition in Slovakia and the Construction of Recollection

The commemoration of the Velvet Revolution of 1989 was complicated by two factors. The first was the complexity of remembering a milestone experienced as part of a now defunct Czechoslovak state. The second was the competing mnemonic stances of political actors in Slovakia. The ambivalent stance of the main governing party Smer was offset by the affirmative stance of the opposition, whose separate commemorations of 1989 challenged the government’s fitness to lead the celebration. This dichotomy reflected both the differing levels of engagement of former communist Prime Minister Fico and his opposition in the events of 1989 and the political divisions of 2009. However, the memory regime fragmented rather than fully polarized, as different historical reference points have exposed differing fault lines between political actors.