(source: Sme - Jozef Jakubčo)
Welcome to your weekly commentary and overview of news from Slovakia. In the final days before the election, the leading candidate is avoiding direct confrontation – and scrutiny. Fico’s apparently Orbán-inspired plan for Slovakia enters a new chapter with the proposed takeover of RTVS. Defence Minister Kaliňák wants to revise the defence cooperation agreement with the US.
If you have a suggestion on how to make this overview better, let me know at michaela.terenzani@spectator.sk.
The lukewarm campaign is almost over
In less than a week, citizens of Slovakia will have their chance to go to the polls to elect their country’s next head of state. Although the president, who also formally serves as commander-in-chief, is not the most powerful person in a state where the prime minister heads the executive branch, the result of the vote will be very consequential not just for Slovakia, but also for the wider region.
This coming weekend, we will most likely learn the names of the two candidates who will advance to the run-off round two weeks later, as it is unlikely that anyone will gain the more than 50 percent of the valid votes needed to be elected in the first round – something that has never happened in almost 25 years of direct presidential elections.
11 candidates
So, after the second round, it will be Mr President again, after just one term in office for the country’s first-ever female president, Zuzana Čaputová. There is not a single woman among this year’s brace of 11 candidates – only the second time since 1999 that this has happened. It is perhaps not too much to interpret this as a reflection of the global trend towards strongmen in national and international politics.
What the March Focus poll says
Pellegrini - 34.4%
Korčok - 33.1%
Harabin - 12.7%
Matovič - 4.7%
Kubiš 4.5%
Second round: Pellegrini 56%, Korčok 44%
That said, we can hardly slap the “strongman” label on the forehead of either of the two candidates that will almost certainly win the popular vote. Peter Pellegrini, the leader of the coalition’s second-biggest party, Hlas, and the current speaker of parliament, has been leading in the polls since long before he made his long-delayed announcement that he would run for the post in mid January. His slogan stresses “peace, pride, and dignity”, and Pellegrini continues to play on his neither-here-nor-there attitude from before last year’s parliamentary election in order not to scare away any group among his diverse electorate – although he is now forced to move within much a narrower field of play after joining Robert Fico’s governing coalition in October.
Ivan Korčok, a former foreign affairs minister whose diplomatic career spans three decades, is trailing Pellegrini slightly; he promises to “serve people rather than politicians”.
