Far-right party leader charged with extremism

Far-right party leader charged with extremism

On Friday, the police pressed charges of extremism against the far-right People's Party Our Slovakia (ĽSNS) leader Marian Kotleba. "He might face between six months and three years in jail," wrote the Pluska.sk website, pointing out that in March 2017 his party had handed out cheques to socially disadvantaged families - each worth €1,488, a number that is used as a Nazi symbol. According to an investigator, Kotleba, who is also Banská Bystrica regional governor, supposedly expressed his sympathies for an organisation promoting the suppression of fundamental rights and freedoms.

As TASR wrote, the number 14 can refer to the number of words in the mission statement of the now-deceased Ku Klux Klan member David Lane - "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children". The letter 'H' is the eighth letter of the alphabet, meaning that 88 can stand for the initial letters of 'Heil Hitler'. By such an act, police believe that Kotleba abused the charity to present his sympathies to an organisation that had preached racial, ethnic and religious hatred in the past.

Marian Kotleba was also a chair of the Slovenská pospolitosť or the Slovak Brotherhood party, which was dissolved due to its extremist program by the Superior Court in 2006. In 2010, Marian Kotleba and people around him took control of the Friends of Wine party, renaming it Kotleba People's Party Our Slovakia, which later made it into parliament in 2016. In May 2017, the Prosecutor General filed a proposal to dissolve the ĽSNS. A month later, another party owned by people from the ĽSNS changed its name to People's Party Fortress Slovakia.

Mojmir Prochazka, Photo: TASR

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