Peter Pellegrini arrived at the EU summit in Brussels on June 27, where he represented Slovakia in place of Prime Minister Robert Fico. (source: AP/TASR)
Welcome to your weekly commentary and overview of news from Slovakia. Smer MPs contrive to spoil Pellegrini’s first official presidential trip. The new president met Ukraine’s President Zelensky in Brussels. The coalition quickly takes control of another cultural fund.
Last Week in Slovakia is taking a short break next week. We will be back with an update on Slovak affairs on July 15 before a longer break later in August.
Smer MPs force Pellegrini to swallow a bitter pill in Prague
“Our differences of opinion on some issues must not endanger nor worsen our splendid brotherly relations,” said President Peter Pellegrini on his first official trip in Prague. He travelled to meet his Czech counterpart, Petr Pavel, honouring a tradition that has developed between Slovaks and Czechs since their 1993 “velvet divorce” which dictates that constitutional officials in both countries pay their first foreign visit to their “brotherly” counterparts.
While Pellegrini acted the statesman, walking down the red carpet in Prague, back home in Bratislava some of the sentiments expressed by his former coalition allies towards the Czech government were far from velvety.
Nearly simultaneously with the joint press conference of the two presidents in Prague, Smer MPs stood before journalists in the conference room of the Slovak parliament to wag accusing fingers at the Czech ministers and the country’s police.
Former Slovak Police Corps president Tibor Gašpar suggested that the Czech police are overlooking cases of people who have expressed approval online of the May 15 attack on Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico. Gašpar, who was last week elected to fill the post of deputy speaker of parliament vacated by Smer’s Ľuboš Blaha, who is preparing to take up his new mandate in the European Parliament, is among the defendants in the Purgatory case, where he faces accusations of abusing the police force to target the Smer party’s political opponents. The irony that he is now accusing the Czech police of supposedly acting based on political motivation, seems lost on him.
