A shocking news from Slovakia that reveals the deep crisis of democratic values in the European Union remaines poorly covered by the mainstream media in Europe. A politician, who in 2019 was sentenced by the Slovakia’s Supreme Court to pay EUR 10,000 in fines for anti-Roma racism and was expelled from the Slovak Parliament based on the court decision, is now entering the European Parliament.
Born in 1994, the thirty-year-old Milan Mazurek is a child of the “Democratic transition” in Post-Communist Eastern Europe. He was elected in the EU elections in June without facing any legal obstacles or any significant public opposition in his home country, a clear evidence of the alarming levels of anti-Gypsyism in Slovakia, an EU Member State since 2004. Remarkably, even Robert Fico, the country’s current Prime Minister and leader of the largest party, SMER-SD (Direction – Social Democracy), released a video message in support of Mazurek in 2019. Fico was also accused of racism but in 2020 the prosecution decided that the charges should be dropped.
Milan Mazurek was convicted because of a 2016 radio interview in which he said that “the Gypsy anti-socials have never done anything for the nation and never will”, and for comparing Roma children to “animals in the zoo”. He was a Member of the Slovak Parliament at that time elected from the extreme far-right Kotleba-People’s Party Our Slovakia (ĽSNS). Interestingly, the same year, Milan Mazurek was charged with Holocaust denial for an article he wrote before becoming a MP but the prosecutors did not find anything worrying in Mazurek’s statements that “when it comes to the Third Reich, we only know lies and fairy tales about six million and soap made from Jews… Nothing but lies is taught about Hitler.”
How a Hitler fan who calls Roma “animals” and claims the Holocaust was a hoax ended up in the European Parliament in 2024? How many MEPs share his views? Who is responsible for this? Who will ask these questions given the current catastrophic state of the Roma NGO sector and the lack of Roma political representation at European and national level? Without leaders, without friends, without allies, the Roma are left alone against their enemies. Еxhibitions and festivals to celebrate Roma culture are important, but they seem strange when the bearers of Roma culture themselves are threatened. Should we preserve the culture without caring about the people? Unless someone has already written off the Roma and decided to turn them into museum exhibits or a tourist attraction. In fact, this is an old idea of the far right in Europe that may come to fruition if the normalization and mainstreaming of neo-fascism in European politics continues unopposed.
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