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IS THAT A FAILURE OF DEMOCRACY, OR ITS HARDEST TEST?
LEARN
RIGHTS CAN OUTRUN CONSENT.
A MARRIAGE THAT EXISTS ON ONE SIDE OF A BORDER
A marriage can exist on one side of a European border and not on the other.
In 2020, two Slovak men, Ivan Novotný and Metod Špaček, married in Austria. Six years later, Slovakia still refuses to register it. Both are lawyers and former diplomats. Neither is asking their country to change its definition of marriage. They are asking it to recognise one that already exists under the law of another member state of the European Union (Cameron, 2026).
Their case rests on a judgment the EU’s highest court delivered in November 2025. A member state need not open marriage to same-sex couples. But it cannot refuse to recognise one lawfully concluded elsewhere in the Union by citizens who have exercised their right to move and live there (Court of Justice of the European Union, 2025).
Slovakia’s interior minister refused. He argued that the civil registry has no authority to register such a union, since family status remains a matter for the member states (Cameron, 2026). Prime Minister Robert Fico was blunter: the registration of such marriages, he said, is “non-existent under Slovak law” (AFP, 2026).
In September 2026, Slovakia’s Constitutional Court rejected a petition from MPs who had asked it to declare parts of the marriage laws unconstitutional, because parliament had repeatedly failed to recognise same-sex couples (AFP, 2026).
This is not a frivolous argument. It is an argument about who decides.
Two claims meet in this case, and both deserve to be taken seriously. One says that a person’s rights do not depend on whether their neighbours approve. The other says that in a democracy, people decide together how they live. Most of the time the two never collide.
Here, they do.
We have been here before, although we rarely remember it this way.
On 9 November 1989, people began crossing a border that had divided Berlin for almost three decades. Some climbed the Wall. Others embraced strangers or simply walked into a part of their city they had never been permitted to enter. What had seemed permanent was becoming history.
Across Central and Eastern Europe, governments were replaced, constitutions rewritten and the language of democracy introduced into public life. Freedom had become a political reality.
But what did it mean to become free?
The expectations people held about one another did not change at the same speed. Perhaps the harder transformation was never the movement from dictatorship to democratic institutions. It was the movement from understanding freedom as something we had finally obtained to recognising it as something that must also belong to others.
Even when their beliefs are different.
Even when their identities challenge familiar expectations.
Even when the lives they choose are not lives we would choose for ourselves.
This article asks what happens when rights arrive before consent, before a majority has accepted them. The case at its centre concerns same-sex couples, but the question is wider. Is that a failure of democracy, or its hardest test?
The Wall could fall in a night. What comes after takes longer to learn.