In order to challenge the observed democratic backslide manifested in increasing number of populist, extremist, and incompetent MPs over the past decade, via improvement of the expert competency of Slovak politicians, Institute for Political and Economic Education (IPEV) has decided to utilize the previous experience with organizing education events and existing expert network to develop this program – The Political Academy, an expert educational non-partisan and non-ideological program.
The main objective of this project is to equip the promising and ambitious politicians with much needed competencies. The necessity of this is based in a finding that even skilled politicians lack expertise and competence when it comes to in-depth discussions, data analysis, and qualified decision-making, while others have this knowledge but lacking communication and marketing skills instead.
In Slovakia, political parties do not run educational programs and analytical support for their MPs, as it is in e.g. Germany, Netherlands and other Western European countries. There is no tradition of continuous education and competency development of MPs. Thus, the Political Academy is a unique way to gain this expertise. To the best of our knowledge, there is no such other educational program for ambitious politicians from all parts of the political spectrum in any other country.
We are proud to say that the former president of Slovak Republic, Mr. Andrej Kiska, kindly expressed support to our program (video below in Slovak)