Sme daily editor-in-chief Beata Balogová (source: SME/Jozef Jakubčo)
Robert Fico will have his own president. After ten years, the democratic counterbalance to autocrats will be moving out of the Presidential Palace. The palace will symbolically return to the days when it still served the communist pioneers.
This time there will probably not be a boisterous Smer choir singing on the balcony, but even Peter Pellegrini’s victory sounds similar to Fico’s statement: “We are the one who rule now”.
At the same time, the outcome of the presidential election clearly shows what most of us have known for a long time: Slovakia is a divided country and does not belong entirely to Smer and Fico.
Pellegrini, since he will formally be the new president, did not win because Ivan Korčok was a weak candidate. On the contrary. After Korčok’s victory in the first round, Fico and Pellegrini understood that the theory of the bag of potatoes does not apply, and without more intensive help from the most extreme strata of society, they will not defeat Korčok.
