President will appoint Fico cabinet on Wednesday

The Slovak National Party (SNS) has withdrawn elected ultranationalist lawmaker and hunter Rudolf Huliak (NK/SNS) as its candidate for the environment minister following the president’s reservations from last week.

On Tuesday, the party announced that it nominated the ultranationalist elected lawmaker Tomáš Taraba (Život/SNS) instead.

After Smer chair Robert Fico, the future prime minister, presented his complete list of future ministers to President Zuzana Čaputová, she announced that she would appoint the new government, and Fico’s fourth cabinet, during the first parliamentary session in the new term on Wednesday afternoon.

Taraba’s goal

President Zuzana Čaputová did not consider Huliak the right person for the ministerial job as he questions Slovakia’s environmental policy, denies climate change and threatens conservationists.

“We managed to put our egos aside,” Huliak said on Tuesday.

Had the SNS insisted on Huliak, Fico’s new cabinet would probably not have been appointed this week. Fico made it public after the election that he would like to attend the European summit in Brussels at the end of October as Slovakia’s prime minister. Migration and Ukraine are expected to be two of the main topics, topics on which Fico will hold opposite views to most European leaders. Following the SNS’s concession, SNS leader Andrej Danko expects favours from Fico in return - more money for the ministries in the SNS portfolio.

Taraba, who joined the parliament for the first time in 2020 on the slate of the far-right party ĽSNS, is regarded as a politician who aims to weaken nature protection.

“If there will be a problem with my nomination, then we are talking about a pure effort to prevent the formation of a pro-national government in Slovakia,” Taraba said prior to the president’s decision.

The future environment minister added that he studied at a prestigious school in Germany and speaks three foreign languages. But he also mocked the president’s daughter online in 2021, intended to ban rainbow flags from public buildings, and did business with people who face or faced criminal charges.

Danko attacks president

On Tuesday, Huliak claimed again that the Environment Ministry is under the control of non-governmental organisations. Taraba is not a friend of NGOs, either. He is hoping to ban NGOs that deal with LGBT+ rights from schools.

The Slovak National Party also attacked the president on Tuesday.

According to Danko, Čaputová is a “lawyer from a dump”.

“If non-governmental organisations had not poured millions of euros into her, she would never have been Slovak president,” Danko added.

Danko also said that Huliak would become the minister one day. He did not provide more detail, though.