Robert Fico arrives to Smer headquarters on election night. (source: Sme - Marko Erd)
Welcome to the election edition of your weekly commentary and overview of news. Slovakia has voted, here is how it went and what comes next.
Smer wins the most votes
Robert Fico has now – almost – made it. After the 2020 election, most political commentators, but also his political opponents and former allies, wrote his political obituary. There was no way he could survive the election defeat that came on the heels of massive street protests, fuelled by daily doses of information about the criminal cases that his nominees in government and their cronies had been implicated in.
This morning he is resurgent – but he is not the Robert Fico we once knew. Smer won this election in large part because Fico surrounded himself with people who do not mind telling blatant lies, calling Russia an amazing country and blaming Ukraine for the Russian invasion of its own territory.
By convention, the president first asks the leader of the party that has won the most votes to try to form a ruling coalition by gathering a majority in the new parliament. Zuzana Čaputová will thus assign Robert Fico the privilege of addressing potential partners first – as she said she would, regardless of who came first in the election. Smer says it will make a statement only after the official results are in later this morning. For now, it appears Robert Fico’s best bet will be a coalition with his former protégé Peter Pellegrini, who now leads the third-place Hlas party, and the nationalist Slovak National Party (SNS), which just scraped back into parliament by clearing the 5-percent threshold required to win seats.
Based on the preliminary results, the parliament will be composed of seven parties.
