Ivan Korčok celebrates his success in the first round. (source: Sme - Jozef Jakubčo)
Welcome to your weekly commentary and overview of news from Slovakia. Korčok vs. Pellegrini will be a tight race. The Special Prosecutor’s Office ends. Slovakia may buy four more F-16s jets from the US.
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Korčok wins first round
The first round of Slovakia’s presidential election ended with a result that is both surprising and unsurprising.
As expected, the run-off round will be a duel between two natives of Banská Bystrica: Peter Pellegrini and Ivan Korčok. It will also represent a familiar choice between the populists of the ruling coalition and the wider centre-right opposition (I use ‘centre-right’ here in its traditional sense, albeit conventional descriptors can now seem increasingly obsolete). This is something that Slovakia’s electorate is quite used to from past presidential run-offs. To mention just the most recent, in 2019 it was Zuzana Čaputová vs. EU commissioner Maroš Šefčovič (backed by Smer), and five years before that, Andrej Kiska ran against Smer leader Robert Fico.
What did come as a surprise to many people is that Korčok actually won the first round, and by an unexpectedly large margin. For most of the campaign, he had trailed Hlas party leader Pellegrini in opinion polls, with only the very last surveys before the moratorium hinting that he might just shade a victory in the first round. In the end he won 42.5 percent of the vote, more than 5 percent ahead of Pellegrini on 37 percent. That’s no landslide – by comparison, Čaputová won 40.5 percent to Šefčovič’s 18.6 percent in the first round five years ago – but it is, as a visibly moved Korčok described it to his supporters on election night, “hopeful”.
