Marek Kapusta, 26

When he became national coordinator of Slovakia’s Rock volieb’98, a young voter mobilization campaign modeled on “Rock the Vote” in the U.S., Marek Kapusta wasn’t optimistic. Four years of Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar’s authoritarian rule left the entire country isolated and the electorate cynical. So you can imagine how young people felt: projections were that only 20% of 18- to 21-year-olds, the Rock volieb’98 target group, would turn out for the national poll. “There was quite a bit of hopelessness,” Kapusta recalls. “People didn’t want to vote.”

Then came Kapusta’s blitz of concerts; more than 30 television and radio commercials featuring Czech ice-hockey star Jaromir Jagr, U.S. rapper Coolio and a number of Slovak personalities; and a cross-country bus tour. Some 80% of those 18- to 21-year-olds voted, helping bring a coalition of more democratic parties to power. “With or without our campaign, the democratic forces would probably have won,” Kapusta says. “But they wouldn’t have won [such a large] majority without our efforts.” Since then Kapusta has put his talent and energy to work throughout Eastern and Central Europe, including Bosnia, Croatia, Ukraine and Yugoslavia. He spent much of last year helping Serbia’s opposition group Otpor to devise and run its own voter mobilization campaign. “I think the era of authoritarian regimes is ending,” Kapusta says. The Serbian experience convinced him of two things: the situation is never as hopeless as it may seem and local advisers are often more effective than experts from Washington or Brussels. “It’s not just that we are close in language and geography, but we have experience with the transition to democracy,” he says. “We don’t study it at school, we experience it first-hand.”