When Robert Fico was prime minister between 2006-2010, he and his social democratic party formed a coalition with the nationalist party and the People's Party. Back then, this combination had a parliamentary majority.
In the 2010 elections, however, while Fico's social democratic party won even more seats than in 2006, the nationalist party and the People's Party suffered massive losses and the coalition lost its parliamentary majority, thereby making way for a four-party centre-right coalition (not including any of the parties that formed the previous government). Regardless of the election results it wasn't altogether certain if Fico would've continued to govern together with the nationalist party, this cooperation between a social democratic party and a nationalist party having earned him substantial criticism and a suspension from the Party of European Socialists.
Except... it isn't. The example I gave is only one of many inaccuracies and misrepresentations that can be found in the Telegraph's reporting on the EU and the eurozone. I'm not saying there aren't reasons to be sceptic of European integration, but the Telegraph takes a particularly low-on-facts approach to defaming the EU.
Oh okay, now it makes sense to me.
It seems that in Eastern Europe there's the same "sickness" of Social-Democratic/Third Way parties trying to fool people with political marketing. I mean: the "Socialist Party" from Portugal, France, Spain (Social-Labourist), Austria, the UK (the Labour Party), Hungary, Greece, etc, all these parties are not socialist at all, they're Social-Democratics with strong Third Way behaviour for ages and ages.
The European Socialist Party (in the European Parliament) is a big mess with parties self-called "socialist" (which are not socialist at all because they're for the market-type economy) and parties self-called "social-democratic", but most of them are not socialist or were socialist long, long ago.
In Portugal, I've been listening to Mário Soares saying for decades the same thing he said in an interview last week, that
"democratic socialism and social-democracy is the same thing". This marketing has been done for decades.
I personally believe that there's no such thing as "democratic socialism". That's only a way to imply that other/real socialist parties/movements are not democratic. Does it mean that neo-socialist parties (like the portuguese "Left Block", the "Socialist Party" from the Netherlands, the Left Alliance from Ireland, the german Die Linke, etc.) are not democratic or that haven't been democratically elected? Obviously not. And these are the parties that really represent socialism ideology, I think.
Just for curiosity, in Portugal, we have the "Partido Social-Democrata", but this party is (and defines it self as) a right-wing party (center-right when trying to conquer votes). It's basically a Conservative Party with Economic-Liberalists but self-called... Social-Democratic. Isn't it funny?
Do these people constantly forget that social-democracy was born in some sort of discontent with original socialism and, for so, these are two different ideologies? Do they forget that some people know that they're fooling many other with this political marketing?