The leader of the Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OĽ) party, Igor Matovič, has said that if candidates for his party who object to undergoing a lie detector test do not leave of their own accord he himself will remove them from the party’s slate for the March 10 general election, the TASR newswire reported. Members of the Civic Conservative Party (OKS) and Conservative Democrats of Slovakia (KDS) parties, who oppose the lie detector tests, have already announced that they will leave the OĽ slate.
“Yesterday they said that if I call on Messrs [Vladimír] Palko [KDS] and [Peter] Zajac [OKS] to take a lie-detector test, 23 people would withdraw their candidacy,” said Matovič, as quoted by TASR. “So I’m assuming that they are not there any more.”
Matovič added that he had only invited Zajac and Palko to join him in being asked, while connected to a polygraph, or lie detector, whether they had ever taken a bribe.
“People do not deserve to buy a pig in a poke 22 years after the Velvet Revolution,” he said, as quoted by TASR.
Matovič described Zajac and Palko as being “afraid” to take the test and claimed that this “indicates something”.
In a series of moves which have seen OĽ lose of some of its most high-profile candidates, the departing OKS and KDS party members were joined by several independent candidates, including scientist and journalist Martin Mojžiš (who formerly occupied the number one position on the OĽ slate), journalist Eugen Korda, actor Štefan Bučko and diplomat Dagmar Babčanová.
Matovič said the OĽ slate was not disintegrating, but has merely been “purified”.
Source: TASR
Compiled by Radka Minarechová from press reports
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