Explaining the Limited Success of the Communist-Successor Left

Most of the literature on communist-successor parties has focused on their successful return to power in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. This article aims to contribute to the wealth of knowledge on communist-successor parties by focusing on the limited success of the Party of the Democratic Left (SDL’) in Slovakia. Although the role of the party during the revolution and its immediate aftermath (1989–90) is shown to be important in shaping the chances for SDL’, the distorting role played by another party, the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS), and the strategic errors committed by the SDL ’ leadership also played their part in the party’s fortunes during the 1990s and help explain SDL’’s ignominious removal from parliament in 2002 when the party gained a paltry 1.36 percent of the vote. The article concludes by drawing the factors together in a modified path-dependent explanation. KEY WORDS Communist-successor parties path-dependency Slovaki