Finance Minister Igor Matovič arrives at a government meeting in Bratislava on September 2, 2022. (source: TASR - Martin Baumann)
The Constitutional Court's ruling on Tuesday that a pro-family package of legislation was unconstitutional would, at most other times, have provoked passionate political reaction.
But, overshadowed by the vote on the fall of the government on the same day, when news of the court's decision was released, its impact was relatively muted.
The ruling that MPs cannot shorten legislative proceedings deliberately and adopt fundamental measures in a hurry does not only apply to MPs of the current ruling coalition. Previous governments also proceeded in the same way in the past, regardless of which parties they were composed of.
The Constitutional Court came close to making a similar ruling two years ago. Four days before parliamentary elections in 2020, the outgoing Smer government pushed legislation on a 13th pension payment through parliament in a short-tracked procedure.
President Zuzana Čaputová immediately challenged this move at the Constitutional Court. She justified this by saying that her reservations related exclusively to the legislative process.
"Specifically, the gross and unprecedented abuse of the institute of short-tracked legislative procedure, which has no parallel in the current legislative history of the Slovak Republic," explained Martin Strižinec, Čaputova's spokesperson. At the time, Smer together with the votes of SNS, Sme rodina and ĽSNS provided the votes to pass the law in the disputed way.
