(source: Sme - Jozef Jakubčo)
Welcome to your weekly commentary and overview of news from Slovakia. A prominent Smer candidate and former police chief is arrested and charged, but Smer’s ‘snowball’ of support continues rolling. The highest-ever number of Slovaks living abroad want to vote in the upcoming election. One of the three judges on the panel who decided on the Kuciak murder case three months ago opined that Kočner could have masterminded the killings.
If you have a suggestion on how to make this overview better, let me know at michaela.terenzani@spectator.sk.
Smer’s support keeps rising despite mounting criminal cases
Smer may now be benefiting from the snowball effect, the latest election modelling by the NMS polling agency for the Sme daily suggests. The survey comes just six weeks before the election. It shows Smer’s percentage continuing to grow, albeit gradually, at the expense of some of its potential coalition partners – namely the Hlas party, founded in 2020 by breakaway Smer politicians, and the Republika party, comprising another group of renegades, this time from the neo-fascist People’s Party Our Slovakia (ĽSNS).
In fact, the results of the latest survey using the NMS model – which weighs support based, among other things, on how committed voters say they are to voting for the party they prefer – show that there may be an option for Smer to gather a coalition that would not include Republika. This makes a difference especially with regard to Hlas, which has labelled Republika as one of the parties with which it will not go into government. The Smer-Hlas coalition scenario partly relies on the Slovak National Party (SNS), which failed to get elected in 2020, making it into parliament this time.
Meanwhile, Smer last week was confronted with another challenge – the latest of many – in the realm of criminal prosecution. Police brought charges against the number nine candidate on Smer’s election slate, Tibor Gašpar.
The police are sticking with biblical allusions when it comes to naming their cases: following on from Purgatory and Judas, the latest is dubbed Ezekiel 7 (“The end has come!”, declares the relevant book and chapter of the Bible).
