The Supreme Audit Office (NKÚ) will still have to wait for a new chair after a fifth vote for this post, which should have taken place on May 28, failed. Since the ruling Smer party decided there would be a secret ballot, the opposition parties withdrew their candidate Maroš Žilinka, the SITA newswire reported.
“If somebody deceives you four times, for the fifth time we say – let’s do the public [recorded] vote,” said chair of the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKÚ) Pavol Frešo, as quoted by SITA, when commenting on the requirement of the People’s Platform, which as well as the SDKÚ includes the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH) and Most-Híd parties.
Frešo said that the People’s Platform would not look for any other candidate for the NKÚ chair. With the fifth failed election, Slovakia has returned to the era of the Vladimír Mečiar government, during which the international community considered Slovakia a black hole, he added.
During the discussion which preceded the election, Smer criticised Žilinka’s independence, saying that in the last parliamentary elections he ran on the slate of KDH, and that in the previous government he served as state secretary of the Interior Ministry.
Pavol Hrušovský of KDH responded Žilinka had never been a KDH member, and that he ran in the elections as an independent, SITA wrote. He also said that Smer was breaking its pre-election promises since some posts which should have belonged to the opposition are still unfilled.
The current parliament has already made four attempts to elect a new NKÚ chairman, after the term of Ján Jasovský, who was elected to the post in 2004, elapsed. None of the votes was successful.
Fico has said that his MPs will only support a candidate who receives unanimous opposition support.
Parliament failed to elect Kamil Krnáč and then Vladimír Klimeš, after MPs from Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OĽaNO) did not vote for them and Smer withdrew its support, citing a lack of unified support among the opposition.
Source: SITA
Compiled by Radka Minarechová from press reports
The Slovak Spectator cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information presented in its Flash News postings.
