COLUMN ONE : Slovakia’s Difficult Transition : Kidnaping of president’s son exposes country’s tentative grasp on democracy. Although its economy is solid, the nation’s move away from totalitarianism is shaky.

Being the son of the president has its benefits, particularly for a budding entrepreneur hoping to make a killing in the rough-and-tumble markets of newly capitalist Central Europe.

Michal Kovac Jr., the son of Slovak President Michal Kovac, enjoys instant name recognition. He gets high-powered invitations. And he does not lack for business associates, especially those wanting to exploit his familial connections.

But the 33-year-old Kovac is learning, in an unexpectedly bruising way, that having a father in high office can also be perilous in Slovakia, the bad boy of Central Europe, where business is booming but democracy is going bust.

Kovac is free on $100,000 bail in neighboring Austria, where he spent 32 days in jail this fall after being kidnaped near his Bratislava home by a gang of armed men, given electric shocks to his genitals, pumped full of whiskey and dragged across the border. His kidnapers are suspected of being political enemies of his father who hoped to embarrass the president by having his son arrested on an Interpol warrant stemming from a year-old German fraud case.

The Austrian courts are trying to decide whether to extradite Kovac to Germany, where he is wanted for questioning in the case, or let him return home because of the peculiar circumstances of his arrest. Twenty-two pounds thinner and a bit shaken, he has taken refuge for the time being in a Silesian monastery.

“I had received blackmail messages saying, ‘If your father does not resign, we will keep after you until the very end,’ ” Kovac said in an interview in Vienna. “I hope this will help Slovak citizens wake up. If they are willing to do this to me, at what point will they stop?”

The kidnaping of a president’s son would create a sensation most anywhere, but in Slovakia it has done more than grab headlines. Kovac’s ordeal--and its tempestuous political context--has exposed Slovakia’s rocky democracy and illustrated how difficult the transformation from totalitarianism remains in the former Eastern Bloc.

For all the encouraging economic news in the region--Slovakia had the second-highest growth rate last year among post-Communist countries and projects the same in 1995--a stable democratic culture has been slow to take root here and, to a lesser extent, in some neighboring countries as well.

* Across the border in Poland, President Lech Walesa lost reelection Sunday, in part because of his autocratic antics, including colluding with the country’s top generals in a successful bid to oust the defense minister. Walesa’s former legal adviser, who had ensured that the president stayed within the letter of the law, said he finally quit because he did not want to be remembered as “the murderer” of Poland’s young democracy.

* In the Czech Republic, nearly three years have passed and the coalition government has still not established the second chamber of the bicameral Parliament as required in the country’s constitution adopted in December, 1992. The Czech Senate was conceived as an important democratic check on government-sponsored legislation, which now can be challenged only by the president.

* In Hungary, the budgets of the state television and news agency still fall under the control of the prime minister, a politically cozy arrangement established under communism that has been declared unconstitutional by Hungarian courts. In a practice reminiscent of the past, ruling governments have slanted political coverage by giving sympathetic journalists key posts in the state-controlled media.

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“When I was 8 years old, fascism came to Slovakia. When I was 18 we got communism. Democracy didn’t come until I was already of retirement age,” said Lubomir Liptak, 66, a historian at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. “I never had the opportunity to be a democrat. Neither did most other Slovaks . . . and the situation is not unique to Slovakia.”

The situation, however, is the most serious in Slovakia. Unlike the problems in neighboring countries, where the general trend is indisputably in the direction of democracy, the assault on Slovak freedoms is regarded as systematic, pervasive and potentially destabilizing.

Worries are worsened by the newborn country’s inexperience in governing itself, democratically or otherwise. Slovakia was the junior partner in the Czech-dominated Czechoslovakia for most of this century, becoming an independent country only in January, 1993, when its 5.3 million residents split from the Czech Republic.

“This is a brand-new country with a constitution that doesn’t address a lot of questions,” said one Western diplomat in Bratislava, the capital. “The legal structure is very fragile, so violating the spirit of the law has had implications for the entire society.”

The European Union and the United States have taken the unusual step of publicly reminding Slovakia that its “acceptance into the transatlantic community” requires greater progress in democratic reforms. Until recently, Slovakia had been one of four former Communist countries most frequently mentioned as likely new members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union and other Western institutions.

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In September, U.S. Defense Secretary William J. Perry, on a tour of Central Europe, warned that the Slovak government did not sufficiently tolerate diverse opinions, support constitutional rights or provide “transparency of government.” Last month, the U.S. government delivered a diplomatic note to Slovak Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar further outlining its concerns.

“The collapse of the old Communist system, in some countries, happened in a day,” said Stanislaw Gomulka, a professor at the London School of Economics who has written about problems of transformation in the region. “But developing a proper new political system takes time. The distance between the actual situation and the ideal situation varies between countries. Slovakia is probably the most problematic of all.”

As the kidnaping has vividly illustrated, the threat to Slovak democracy emanates in part from the stormy relationship between Kovac and Meciar, who has made no secret of his desire to oust Kovac before the presidential term formally ends in 1998. Kovac has accused Meciar associates of complicity in his son’s abduction.

Western diplomats and Slovak opposition leaders say Meciar has single-handedly veered the country off the steady path to democracy, using his authority as prime minister to harass opponents, consolidate economic and political power and purge thousands of people he deems disloyal from state-controlled jobs--from hospital directors to local librarians.

Kovac’s mistake was daring to stand in the way, vetoing legislation and refusing to accept nominations to several important posts. Last year, after Meciar’s party finished first in parliamentary elections, he held an all-night session of Parliament in which he dismissed three dozen key government officials, canceled privatization programs and wrested control of the secret police from the president.

Since then, Meciar has transformed Slovak state television into a virtual mouthpiece of his Movement for a Democratic Slovakia and has recently moved to bring Slovak radio into line as well. Last month the Bratislava newspaper SME, his most steadfast critic, was forced to find a new printer after its publishing house of two years abruptly refused to work with the paper. The company cited unpaid bills, but editors accused “the powers that be” of trying to silence their publication.

“At this time, the future of Slovakia is being decided: whether we will be a truly democratic country or some sort of ‘Slovak way’ will develop which is reminiscent of the old Communist times,” said Eduard Kukan, a former foreign minister and a onetime ally of Meciar’s. “We risk really being left out, of becoming an isolated island in Europe, like Albania used to be.”

The circumstances of the younger Kovac’s kidnaping are murky, particularly because the president’s son, who runs an import-export business specializing in powdered milk, has some nefarious friends and business associates. One of those associates, serving a prison sentence in Germany, implicated the younger Kovac last fall in a $2.3-million fraud case involving a Slovak company that paid for but never received a shipment of textiles.

Both father and son, in separate interviews, declared the innocence of the younger Kovac, who was kidnaped just as German prosecutors had agreed to travel to Bratislava to take his statement in the case.

The voluntary testimony would have removed the grounds for the arrest warrant, said Elmar Kresbach, Kovac’s Austrian lawyer, compelling the kidnapers to act quickly if they wanted to embarrass the president by putting his son behind bars.

The president has accused the Slovak Information Service, the secret police run by a top Meciar appointee, of complicity in his son’s abduction.

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Although a link has not been proved, two police investigators were pulled off the case by Meciar supporters after publicly indicating that their investigations had led them to the secret police. One investigator was dismissed in the middle of a news conference he had called to discuss the case.

“I have information that the prime minister and the director of the secret police for a long time were investigating not only the activities of my son, but also my activities,” Kovac said in an interview at his presidential palace. “They were looking for something which could compromise me. I know of two cases where there were attempts to persuade people in the course of the investigation to drag my son into the case. From these other cases, I can deduce that similar attempts could have occurred in this incident.”

Meciar’s coalition government has branded the president a traitor for sullying the country’s reputation and is contemplating a formal charge of treason. Meciar claims that the older Kovac, a onetime ally whom Meciar nominated for the presidency in 1993, has taken on the causes of the opposition and is bent on bringing down his government.

The prime minister’s supporters have even suggested the kidnaping was staged by the president in the hopes of discrediting Meciar.

“The opposition is essentially not willing to accept its defeat in the last elections and in its endless desire for power is trying to cast doubt on a governing process in which it has no influence,” said Oliver Csiky, an official in Meciar’s party. “It has not been determined by a court that a kidnaping even took place. What is being forgotten is the son of the president is being sought in a fraud case involving more than $2 million. In the West, that would be grounds for the president to resign.”

The younger Kovac says his abductors, one of whom was in military uniform, pulled him from his car on the way to work, assaulted him with an electric prod and forced him to drink more than a full bottle of whiskey to knock him out.

Police in Hainburg, Austria, about 10 miles west of Bratislava on the main road to Vienna, found him six hours later slumped in the back seat of his car near the village police station. Found with him were copies of confidential faxes about his pending testimony in the fraud case, believed to have been obtained through a wiretap on his telephone.

“I found in investigating this case that Kovac had done nothing wrong, and here I sit, having lost my career,” said Jaroslav Simunic, one of the police detectives removed from the case who later resigned from the department under pressure. “But it is just as well this happens now, while we still have some democracy and I can talk to you about it.”

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Bad Boy of Central Europe

Slovakia, where economic success is soaring far ahead of democratic reforms, illustrates the Eastern Bloc’s difficulty in leaving totalitarianism behind.