Kotleba – People's Party Our Slovakia

Neither Kotleba nor Slovak Togetherness was a stranger to such rhetoric, yet the party never amounted to anything more than a marginal political force.

In a country where polls show more than half of people believe conspiracy theories and two-thirds do not trust state institutions, hoaxes and fake news have an infectious power.

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Nicknamed the "forbidden survey", it was crowdfunded by civic initiative 50dni.sk. (Meaning "50days", the name is a cheeky reference to a government proposal late last year to introduce a 50-day moratorium on polls, which was scuppered by the constitutional court.)

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A priest from Trnava, a city 40 kilometres to the east, offered his blessing to Kotleba, his party and its supporters — intoning that they could "save our beloved country".

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"Namely because of the situation we've seen since 2016, when a party supposedly built on a neo-Nazi ideology entered parliament," said Vilagi from Comenius University in Bratislava.

She was referring to the far-right Kotleba - People's Party Our Slovakia (LSNS), which is polling in second or third place ahead of the country's February 29 parliamentary election.

Four years later, with LSNS polling around 14 per cent ahead of a parliamentary election at the end of February, that question has a new urgency.

The party's rise has polarised Slovak society and divided opinion among commentators, experts and political leaders about whether to sup with the devil — and if so, with how long a spoon.

"She brought a spirit of positive energy that has broken the bad mood that Slovaks have had for a long time," Zuborova, an analyst at the Bratislava Policy Institute think tank, told BIRN in an interview.

"She also represented a new hope that Slovakia might take a different direction than the rest of Central Europe."

In recent European Parliament elections, 16 per cent of voters in the Hlohovec district backed the People's Party Our Slovakia (LSNS), widely seen as neo-fascist. In one of the town's electoral districts, support for the party topped 30 per cent.