None of the seven presidential hopefuls is likely to receive enough votes to become president after the first round of the election on March 21, according to the prognostications of several Slovak political analysts on March 11.
Grigorij Mesežnikov of the Institute for Public Affairs (IVO) believes that a second round of the voting will take place for sure. He told the TASR newswire that the law dictated that the first round can only be won by a candidate who receives an absolute majority of votes from all eligible voters and since the voter turnout may well not even exceed 50 percent, the requirement will not be fulfilled.
“Even if [incumbent president] Ivan Gašparovič receives more than half of all votes of people who show up to vote, it won't be the absolute majority of all eligible voters,” said Mesežnikov.
According to political analyst Miroslav Kusý, the current distribution of political forces rules out the option of having a president elected in the first round. “There's no point in speculating, the forces are distributed in a way that no one expects such a miracle to come true,” he told TASR.
The first round of the presidential elections will take place on March 21 and a second round is scheduled for April 4 with a head-to-head vote between the two candidates with the highest vote totals in the first round. Another political analyst Samuel Abrahám added that given the system of the presidential election in Slovakia, it was 99.99-percent certain that no candidate will be elected in the first round. TASR
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
The Slovak Spectator cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information presented in its Flash News postings.
