Slovakia’s new president heard the unspoken wishes of the electorate – just like the Hungarian prime minister. . Understanding how to create trust with voters is the foundation of a successful politician.

What do Andrej Kiska and 

Viktor Orban Have in Common?

by Martin Ehl

To compare the political newcomer Andrej Kiska with an experienced hand such as Viktor Orban might seem crazy. One of them comes off as a civil, political blank slate and the other as a political veteran shut inside a fortress of power. However know how to tap into something that is at once public and intimate, intangible, and politically very important: the trust of the voters.

In Kiska’s narrow rhetorical repertoire, from which he never strayed during the campaign that just ended, a key theme was restoring voters’ trust in the political system. Kiska thus hit on the more intimate part of the relationship between the politician and the voter, in which the citizen introduces, through voting in a secret and free election, that fragile part into the equation in the form of his or her own expectations. From that perspective the relationship is one-sided. After depositing that paper into the ballot box, the voter has few other tools to correct the politician if he violates the relationship.

The Central European, post-communist voter has the feeling, rather, that politicians try to figure out how to bypass the voter's trust in order to achieve their own goals, which do not always have to be declared during the campaign. Often voters feel that the politician is insincere, or does not hear them, or that he has ulterior motives. He does not care much about the public good, but in the best case about power and in the worst case about his own enrichment, or someone else’s.

It was in part owing to that distrust that Kiska won the presidency.

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