There’s a packed crowd of Democrats running in the 2020 election, many of whom are campaigning with environmentalism as a top priority. If those candidates want to run a successful campaign, they should look towards Slovakia where Zuzana Caputova, an environmental activist and anti-corruption candidate, is poised to win the presidential election.
Caputova captured 40 percent of the vote, trouncing her nearest competitor who won just 19 percent. Because no candidate won 50 percent, a runoff will be held on March 30, which puts her in a favorable position to win. In 2016, she received the Goldman Prize, sometimes referred to as the Green Nobel, for her work challenging the expansion of a dangerous illegal landfill near her home in the town of Pezinok, where the incidence of cancer had soared.
Her work over more than a decade led to mass protests (at the time “the largest mobilization of citizens since the 1989 Velvet Revolution,” noted the Goldman Prize) and a Slovakian Supreme Court ruling in 2014 that a newly proposed landfill was illegal and the old one should be shut down. It also led to Caputova becoming known as “Slovakia’s Erin Brockovich.” Should she win, she would also become Slovakia’s first female president.
