And yet, the election comes at a febrile political moment: Slovakia appears evenly split between a pro-Western camp that’s alarmed by Russia’s aggression, and a reactionary one that’s suspicious of the West and attuned to the Kremlin’s talking points. And it is this divide that will determine Saturday’s outcome. While political leaders, parties and specific policy issues come and go, some version of this East-West divide has always been present in Slovakia. In 1998, for example, then-budding authoritarian Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar was voted out in an election seen to be existential, after U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had called Slovakia the “black hole” of Europe. Then, in early 2018, Slovaks took to the streets after the murder of journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová, ousting Mečiar’s political and ideological successor Robert Fico. But last October, Fico returned to power, embittered and radicalized by what he called an “attempt to overturn a democratic election,” instigated by philanthropist George Soros and the U.S. Embassy in Bratislava. Since then, the Slovak government has strongly …