SECONDARY school students would elect non-partisan candidate Andrej Kiska as president. This is the result of a new project launched by the Institute for Public Affairs (IVO) called the 2014 Student Presidential Election, which took place at more than 50 secondary schools on Monday, March 10.
Out of a total of 14,200 students aged over 15, 7,644 of them cast their votes in the simulated election, putting the election turnout at 54.49 percent, the TASR newswire wrote on March 11. Kiska won with 36.74 percent, followed by independent candidate Radoslav Procházka, who received 24.7 percent of the vote. Prime Minister Robert Fico ended up third with 10.51 percent, ahead of former politician and actor Milan Kňažko with 9.85 percent. Helena Mezenská (Ordinary People and Independent Personalities) received 5.11 percent, with Hungarian Community Party (SMK) nominee Gyula Bárdos garnering 3.74 percent.
IVO project manager Miroslav Kollár said that the results cannot be seen as a prediction of the official presidential election results or as a representative sample revealing support among older generations. The mock election was inspired by a similar project in the Czech Republic, where students who had a chance to participate in the mock elections were more likely to take part in the first real election in which they were eligible to vote. Kollár pointed to the fact that young people all over the world vote less often than older generations, as they are less interested in politics. This simulated vote is designed to help students get into the habit of voting.
The event will be followed by two other mock student elections this year, one for the European Parliament in May and another for the municipal elections scheduled for November.
Kiska won in 32 of the participating secondary schools, TASR wrote. Procházka followed with 15 wins. Bárdos received the highest share of student votes at a single school (92.4 percent), while Fico received at least one vote in all of the participating schools. Kiska and Kňažko had above average support in private schools. Procházka scored the best at church schools.
(Source: TASR)
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
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