![]() He had a purposeful strut and a boxer’s habit of shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Tall, stocky and balding, and always wearing a neatly trimmed moustache, Kotleba looked equal parts supply teacher and gang leader. Often, there was a personal appeal from Kotleba not to believe the “tendentious opinions” about him in the media. Articles railed against promiscuity, abortion and homosexuality, all of which threatened the traditional family and the Slovak nation. The colourful, four-page leaflets were packed with the tropes that had defined Kotleba’s campaign: decent Slovaks were being exploited and terrorised by corrupt politicians, “Gypsy criminals” and shadowy international forces. ![]() And now, it had the dubious distinction of being the first place in modern Europe to have elected a person widely regarded as a neo-fascist to a major office. At eight minutes to every hour, a clock in the central square plays a dainty jewellery-box jingle. The four-storey mansion, with its vaulted ceilings and gilded pillars, would be his workplace for the next four years.īanská Bystrica is a tranquil kind of place, with a genteel Mitteleuropa charm: the centre has pavement cafes, neat rows of burgher houses and a number of handsome baroque churches. Now, in the biggest electoral shock anyone could remember in the two decades since Slovakia’s independence, the people of Banská Bystrica and the surrounding region had voted for the 37-year-old Kotleba to be their governor. Kotleba venerated Slovakia’s wartime Nazi puppet state, and liked to dress up in the uniforms of its shock troops, who had helped to round up thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. I n December 2013, Marian Kotleba, a former secondary school teacher who had become Slovakia’s most notorious political extremist, arrived to begin work at his new office – the governor’s mansion in Banská Bystrica, the country’s sixth-largest city. ![]()
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