Zuzana Caputova, the President of Slovakia, Voices Her Country’s Hopes and Frustrations

[TomSea]

Zuzana Caputova, the President of Slovakia, Voices Her Country’s Hopes and Frustrations
By Masha GessenDecember 5, 2019


Zuzana Čaputová, the new President of Slovakia, has used her extraordinary pulpit to demand transparency and justice and to create hope.

What’s it like to be the political ray of hope for an entire region of the world? Depending on who is writing, the forty-six-year-old Zuzana Čaputová, the President of Slovakia, may be called upon to save Slovakia, Central Europe, or Central and Eastern Europe. Or all of Europe—Čaputová, who took office in June, is a lone political voice in a sea of demagoguery.

The commentators who anointed Čaputová the savior of regional democracy celebrated her surprise victory in last spring’s Presidential election as a triumph of liberalism in a region that seems to have abandoned liberalism’s ideals. But it’s not liberalism that Čaputová personifies—it’s politics, if one defines politics as an earnest, complicated conversation about values and shared goals. At the start of her campaign, Čaputová told me, she made two decisions: she would accept no professional “marketing” advice, and she would disengage emotionally from the outcome of the election. “People have the right to know who I am. I made an offer, and they can decide whether they accept this offer or not,” she said.

Everyone I talked to about Čaputová, and Čaputová herself, recounted a single, pivotal incident from early in the campaign, when she was asked publicly about her position on the adoption of childen by same-sex couples. The issue, she told me, had recently taken hold of the Slovak imagination. Most other candidates, as far as she could observe, tried to dodge the question. Slovakia is a member of the European Union, but it is one of a half-dozen countries that do not allow same-sex marriage or adoption by same-sex couples, in contravention of European court decisions. As in many Eastern and Central European countries, L.G.B.T. rights are often described in Slovakia as an agenda item foisted on a socially conservative population by meddlesome Western Europeans. Faced with the question, Čaputová responded that, while being raised by biological parents is ideal, any two loving parents, whatever their sexual orientation, are better than an orphanage. A campaign consultant might have told her that this answer would be political suicide, or so Čaputová assumed. Instead, it appeared to be the start of a meteoric rise—not, it seems, because a critical mass of voters agreed with all of her positions but because her honesty and openness, and perhaps her willingness to reason in public, appealed to them.

More at: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/zuzana-caputova-the-president-of-slovakia-voices-her-countrys-hopes-and-frustrations#intcid=recommendations_the-new-yorker-bottom-recirc-similar_56dd3d16-8b61-4bf8-b57e-30e2c2aa6f59_text2vec1_text2VecSimilarity