By Pavol Stracansky
BRATISLAVA, Slovakia, Feb 22 2005 (IPS)

As U.S. President George W.. Bush prepares to meet Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Bratislava to discuss concerns over democracy in Russia, a survey shows that Slovaks think the U.S. President is less a guarantor of democracy than his Russian counterpart.

The two leaders are to hold a summit in the Slovak capital Bratislava Thursday where President Bush is expected to air U.S. concerns over democracy in Russia.

President Bush has said he will question President Putin over what many rights groups inside and outside Russia have warned is growing authoritarianism from the Kremlin. He is expected to deliver a speech emphasising the importance of democracy and praising Slovakia (pop. 5.4 million) as a country that has grown and formed an identity because it has embraced democracy.

But a survey by the Slovak polling agency Markant published this week revealed that many Slovaks associate Putin with democracy more than the U.S. leader – an opinion analysts say is driven by anti-U.S. sentiment over Iraq and a view of President Bush as a politician of war.

"It is not so much that people are responding directly to the question, is Bush more a guarantor of democracy, but that they see him more as a politician of war," Alexander Duleba, analyst at the Slovak Foreign Policy Association (SFPA) told the local daily Sme.

The survey asked respondents whether they saw Presidents Bush and Putin as guarantors of democracy. Forty-three percent said Putin was a guarantor of democracy, as opposed to 35.9 percent for Bush.

It also asked whether respondents agreed with keeping Slovakia’s contingent of roughly 100 troops in Iraq, and how they viewed the recent elections there. Seventy-two percent of respondents said they did not support keeping Slovak troops in Iraq while 32 percent said they did not believe that the elections in Iraq had solved anything.

Slovak Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda has been a staunch supporter of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and has in a number of interviews since the invasion made clear his continued personal backing for President Bush’s policies on Iraq.

Within parliament there has been some opposition to sending and keeping Slovak troops in Iraq but the coalition government led by Dzurinda’s Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKU) party has been largely united on the issue.

While there has been little public protest over Iraq many analysts say that the general feeling among Slovaks remains very negative towards U.S. policy on Iraq.

"The population in general in Slovakia is anti-U.S. and anti-Bush in particular," Ivo Samson, analyst at the SFPA told IPS. "Very few people here, around 20 percent, wanted to see him re-elected and many people were against what happened with Iraq."

President Bush, he said, will have been informed of the results of this survey by his team and will be aware that Slovak opinion is not exactly leaning towards him. "But after what he is likely to receive in Brussels and in Germany, by the time he gets to Slovakia he will probably see it as a nice rest."

Some experts and politicians also say that the survey result reflects the lack of public awareness in the country about the internal socio-political situation in Russia as much as any anti-U.S. feeling.

Robert Kalinak, MP for the left-wing opposition Smer party told Slovak media that "people obviously aren’t aware of issues such as Yukos (the oil giant that collapsed following state interventions), which has very little to do with democracy."

The Slovak media carries images or stories on explosions in the Middle East, violence in Iraq and the scandals at Abu Ghraib, Samson said. "But you do not see or hear anything about what is happening in Chechnya, for instance, because the Russians will not let those sort of pictures out. Therefore Slovaks are not informed about concerns over democracy in Russia."

It appears highly unlikely that much progress will be made on the issue during the summit or at meetings between Slovak officials and the two presidents.

"Prime Minister Dzurinda is under pressure (not to ask about human rights)," Samson said. "The Prime Minister’s support for the U.S. over Iraq raised some ire in Brussels and he was very critical over the issue of the dissidents in Cuba which went against the general line in Brussels."

Dzurinda and Slovak President Ivan Gasparovic have already said they will not raise the issue at personal talks with President Putin.

"Personally I think that Russia is on the path of pioneering free market economics and that it has the ability to straighten out some things that concern us," Dzurinda told Slovak daily Narodna Obroda. "But I do not think that we should use the ground that we have right now at our disposal to open this theme as a priority. There are other themes that are more important from the view of Slovak interests."

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