Slovakia Poll: 58% Say Life Before 1989 Was Better in Some Respects, While 63% Still Call Democracy the Best System
Slovakia's DEKK Institute has published a survey ahead of the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution on November 17: 58 percent of Slovak respondents said life before November 1989 was, to some extent, better than it is today, while 33 percent held the opposite view.
The survey also found that 63 percent of respondents consider democracy the best political system, and only 11 percent believe Slovakia belongs to the East in civilizational and geopolitical terms. The DEKK Institute stressed that people who remember the socialist era positively are not a single, uniform group, and that such nostalgia cannot be read directly as a desire to return to the past, nor as support for Russia.
Institute director Pavol Kosnáč said Slovakia benefited materially under socialism more than Czechia did: industrialization accelerated, and many villages gained sewerage and electricity during that period, leaving more positive memories; he added that black-and-white readings and labelling only deepen social polarization. Researcher Hugo Gloss grouped the reasons for the nostalgia into three: psychological, as loneliness, insecurity about the future and loss of community grow in an individualistic society; economic, as wages have risen about tenfold in thirty years but prices of some staple foods have risen more than fifteenfold, hitting the poorest hardest; and social, as occupations such as miners, workers, farmers, teachers and security personnel lost prestige after the change of regime.
(Source: SITA)
Source: SITA
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：斯洛伐克首都布拉迪斯拉发天际线与多瑙河（资料图）。照片：Frettie 摄，CC BY 3.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / Photo: The Bratislava skyline and the Danube in Slovakia's capital (file photo). Photo by Frettie, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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