Five MPs quit parliamentary OĽaNO caucus

Veronika Remišová is one of the renegades. She is rumoured to be headed to former president Andrej Kiska's new party.

OĽaNO MP Veronika Remišová announced she would leave, alongside her four fellow MPs, the OĽaNO caucus shortly before the 2020 elections.OĽaNO MP Veronika Remišová announced she would leave, alongside her four fellow MPs, the OĽaNO caucus shortly before the 2020 elections. (Source: SITA)

The opposition Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OĽaNO) will lose five members of its caucus.

Veronika Remišová, Elena Červeňáková, Soňa Gaborčáková, Jozef Lukáč, and Anna Verešová made it to the parliament on the OĽaNO slate in the 2016 parliamentary election. They decided to leave shortly before the 2020 general election, with one of the reasons being the fact that the party did not want to accept them as official members, the Sme daily reported.

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“Although we were not OĽaNO members, we have put all our energy into the work for the movement,” five MPs said in their statement, published by the Hospodárske Noviny daily.

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They plan to stay with the movement until the end of the June session since they have joint proposals with OĽaNO, according to Hospodárske Noviny.

After they leave, OĽaNO will be left with only 10 MPs.

No ambition to set up a party

OĽaNO is known for having only four official members. Moreover, they are usually running at the very bottom of the slate. The party, according to the renegades, is not open to taking new members in and does not allow people in regions to take part in party decisions, the leaving group added.

Read also: What do we know about Kiska’s emerging party? Read more 

“The party did not allow new people to become members of the party, not even its MPs,” they wrote in the statement.

Remišová, who has been one of the prominent faces of OĽaNO in the parliament, went on to criticise the party for not reflecting on the situation after the regional elections in 2017, when the change in society, according to her, began.

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“I then hoped OĽaNO would stop being a closed group of the few and function as an open group, with sound foundations in regions,” Remišová wrote on her Facebook. The party, founded in 2011, has not changed since then, she added.

For now, OĽaNO renegades do not have an ambition to establish their own party. They want to continue their effort to fight corruption without verbal attacks and with the help of people in regions.

Will Remišová join Kiska?

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