Slovakia elected its first female president on Saturday, a liberal and pro-European anticorruption candidate whose rise is seen as a rebuke of the conservative nationalism remaking its larger neighbors.
Zuzana Caputova, an environmental lawyer who came to prominence when opposing the expansion of a landfill in her small town, won with 58% of Saturday’s runoff vote. Her chief rival, career diplomat Maros Sefcovic, conceded in a short statement thanking friends and supporters.
Though the role of president in Slovakia is constitutionally limited, her victory was seen as a striking, if isolated political shift for Central and Eastern Europe, a region of former Communist countries that has been ground zero for a new nationalism spreading on the continent.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Poland’s Law and Justice party have each managed to win sweeping majorities in their respective parliaments by promising to keep out Muslim immigrants and entrench Christian conservatism at home. A half dozen candidates made the same pledge during Slovakia’s first-round election, including Mr. Sefcovic.
In contrast, Ms. Caputova touted her social liberalism as proof that she was different from Slovakia’s political class, which has been inundated with corruption scandals. She promoted gay rights in a country with minimal support for same-sex marriage, and argued that Slovakia had some obligation to help its European neighbors by taking in refugees.
She received a boost from the largest antigovernment protests since the fall of Communism, which broke out last year after the murder of a journalist who had been probing graft. For many of those protesters, the barely known Ms. Caputova—until recently the vice chair of a party without a single seat in parliament—represented a definitive break, said Pavol Babos, an assistant professor at Comenius University in Bratislava’s Political Science Department.
“She wasn’t perceived as a politician,” said Mr. Babos, who ran focus groups on various candidates before the vote. “She doesn’t pit elites against the people. It’s a different mind-set.”
In an interview before the vote, 45-year-old Ms. Caputova credited her swift rise to disenchantment among Slovaks with the political leadership and disinterest in its often harsh rhetoric against the European Union. Most voters, she said, wish to stay in the EU, and have grown more worried about corruption and injustice in their daily lives than distant battles in Brussels, the seat of the EU.
“You could perhaps take it as a sign that there has been a stabilization in Slovakia and perhaps the wider region in support for the European Union,” she said, surrounded by young aides bustling about in leather jackets and Converse sneakers.
Migration, she said, was a smaller political issue than it once was: “It’s about striking the right balance, accepting that people have legitimate fears and not abusing those fears.”
It isn’t clear how much Ms. Caputova’s victory or her analysis holds for the wider region, in which nationalist parties remain dominant. Opposition parties in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary have run on a similar mix of anticorruption and social liberalism, with mixed results. In Hungary, liberal candidates tried to defeat Mr. Orban on an antigraft message last year; the prime minister focused on immigration and went on to win a resounding two-thirds majority in parliament.
In Poland, the ex-mayor of a small town, Robert Biedron, is running for prime minister on a promise to bring abortion rights and same-sex marriage to a deeply Catholic country. He touts those views as proof that voters can trust he is a political outsider: “I am authentic,” he said in a recent interview. “And I believe, if we want to get rid of [Poland’s ruling party], which I think should be the main goal of the opposition, it’s to introduce finally progressive politics in Poland.”
But Mr. Biedron has struggled to break through in opinion polls. “My view is that there is no Macron moment in Poland,” said Rafal Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw and a leader of a Conservative opposition party, in reference to the French neophyte who defeated a rising nationalist movement to become president in 2017. “There is not that much room for something completely new, out of the blue.”
Even in Slovakia, Ms. Caputova’s victory is tempered by the 25% of first-round voters who backed radical, pro-Russian candidates. They included a supreme court judge who wishes to leave the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and a self-described Nazi sympathizer, both popular within the country’s military.
Constitutionally, Slovakia’s president has a limited role, with the prime minister the more powerful figure, on balance. Still, Ms. Caputova will have the right to name nine new judges to the country’s 14-member constitutional court. She will serve as commander-in-chief as the country renegotiates a defense agreement with the U.S. that her government, like Hungary’s, has been reluctant to sign.
Write to Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com
