Slovakia has chucked out its government that 'would make Mrs Thatcher go weak at the knees', a flat-taxing, asset privatising, inequality promoting government that replaced the nutty retro-nationalistic left government before it. There is a an excellent quick summary of why this is interesting here.

Slovakia got hothouse economic growth and a surge of foreign investment that has turned it, against all expectations, into the automotive manufacturing center of Eastern Europe. But it also saw sharply increased inequality in income and wealth; and while unemployment went down, the jobs created were mostly available to the young, the urban, and those willing and able to pick up stakes. Jobs may be going begging in the capital, but a few hours west, on the Ukrainian border, the unemployment rate is over 25%.

My own view is that there is a pattern in the former satellite states of Eastern Europe that whoever is in office gets thrown out. This in turn is largely explained by widespread disappointment over economic progress since independence. There was an article in the Economist earlier this year stating living standards are lower (average gross national income-PPP) in every former Soviet state in Europe except Belarus (they would be higher in the caucuses, though). Belarus is richer only because it has had a generous energy subsidy package from Russia to keep it, and the thug Lukashenko, in the thuggish Russian sphere.

But just think about that - seventeen years after the revolution and the the average person is no better off in real terms in the whole of eastern Europe. No wonder governments get changed like dirty shirts. It's amazing democracy has stood up so well (of course, in some states such as the Balkans, democracy didn't stand up at all and that is why those countries have gone so far backwards).