Slovakia's NATO bid not clinched

The champagne is already on ice for most aspirant countries expecting invitations to NATO this fall, but for one, there may be no reason to pop the cork.

While the Baltic states, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria appear likely to be invited at NATO's next major summit in Prague, voters in Slovakia may yet derail their nation's bid if a September election returns populist former Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar to power.

Considered the architect of independent Slovakia for his role in managing the "velvet divorce" from the Czech Republic in 1993, Meciar went on to cripple the Slovak economy and showed little respect for democracy or human rights as prime minister.

His five-year reign was characterized by crackdowns on independent media, harassment of the country's Jewish, Gypsy and ethnic Hungarian minorities and rampant corruption and cronyism, earning Slovakia a near-pariah status in the West.

When the then-Slovak president's son was kidnapped in 1995, the chief suspect was Ivan Lexa, a secret service agent in Meciar's office, who has since disappeared.

He also actively courted Russia, trying to bring the country closer to its sphere of influence and was even known to spout off on occasion about joining a Russia-Belarus-Slovakia axis.

But after being turned out by voters in 1998, Meciar is on the comeback trail and rates near the top of public opinion polls; he tends to garner roughly 30 percent support - ahead of this Septem-ber's election.

Even an attempt to prosecute him in 2000 for allegedly paying illegal bonuses worth $350,000 to his Cabinet has failed to dent his popularity.

NATO has said that should he return, Slovakia will not be welcomed into the alliance. A Meciar victory would also dent the nation's European Union bid.

"I think the (Bush) administration and other NATO leaders have made themselves perfectly clear on Slovakia," said Bruce Jackson, president of the U.S. Committee on NATO and Washington's unofficial ambassador to the alliance. "The candidate countries have the power to set the pace of enlargement themselves."

The trend toward populist, anti-immigration governments in some more established Western European nations has led to fears that Slovakia is headed down a path to ultra nationalism.

Slovak voters are fed up with persistently high unemployment and GDP per head that hovers around 15 percent less than that in the Czech Republic, once the other half of Czechoslovakia.

Incumbent Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda, who heads an unwieldy center-right coalition that is united, chiefly, by its opposition to Meciar, ranks near the bottom of opinion polls, thanks largely to unpopular decisions aimed at reigning in unemployment and reforming the pension system.

Speaking at the summit of NATO hopefuls in Riga last weekend, he said, "There are often prophets of easy ways and a bright future. They are unable to say how they will deal with an issue, but they are always able to find someone to blame for their failures."

NATO leaders say the Slovakia ultimatum proves that the alliance is more than a military alliance, but one based on common democratic values. Dzurinda echoed that in Riga.

"To be a good ally is not only a question of the number of tanks or aircraft. It is, first and foremost, an issue of shared values and principles," he said.