Strengthening Social Democracy in the Visegrad Countries Limits and Challenges Faced by Smer-SD Darina Malová January 2017 Smer-Sociálna Demokracia(Smer-SD) was founded in December 1999 as a result of the defection from the post-communist Party of the Democratic Left(SDĽ) by Robert Fico, the party’s most popular politician at that time. Smer-SD is the largest mainstream party in Slovakia, with stable support. Its mixed, mostly traditional left­-wing(bread-and-butter) appeals and selected social policies have proven popular with the electorate. Robert Fico has remained the key person in Smer-SD. He is the uncontested leader, exercising a large amount of control over the party organisation, including territorial party units, selection of candidates for public elections and many key party decisions. Smer-SD is, in terms of its rhetoric, a traditional socialist party, speaking to the poorer strata, advocating a welfare state, but in reality the party pursues fairly strict austerity policies with occasional‘social packages’. Unlike Western social democratic parties the leaders of Smer-SD are prone to using national and populist appeals. In terms of ideology(like many other parties in Slovakia) Smer-SD is a typical catch-all party with centrist and partly inconsistent party programmes, appeals to ever wider audiences, and the pursuit of votes at the expense of ideology. The weakest points in the public perception of the party are Smer-SD’s murky relations with oligarchs and high levels of corruption.