Hlas chair Peter Pellegrini at the Presidential Palace on October 3, 2023. (source: TASR - Martin Baumann)
Hlas leader and ex-prime minister Peter Pellegrini promised to respond to a generous offer given to him by Progresívne Slovensko (PS), a liberal party that came second in the September election.
In its press release, the liberals said that they offered Pellegrini the possibility of becoming prime minister and his party an equal partner in the potential government. PS was even willing to negotiate on who should become the next interior minister. PS was refusing to give up on this post before.
“Pellegrini has had this information for several days. He promised us a response,” the liberal party said on early Tuesday afternoon.
PS has attempted to form a government with Hlas, which came third in the election, the liberal party SaS and the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH), in order to prevent Smer from taking power again. Smer, under whose governments organised crime and corruption thrived, is led by former three-time prime minister Robert Fico, who holds pro-Russian views and likes the politics of Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán.
Pellegrini responded to PS on late Tuesday afternoon by holding a press conference, telling the press that his party decided to continue further negotiations with Smer and Andrej Danko’s ultranationalist Slovak National Party. Danko, another politician with pro-Russian views, thinks that Putin is a friend of Slovakia.
“Our board unanimously decided that Hlas would conduct further negotiations on the government coalition with the Smer and SNS parties,” said Pellegrini.
Hlas was founded in 2020 by a group of Smer renegades known as Pelle’s Eleven.
The announcement comes a week after the start of post-election negotiations between the political parties that got into parliament. Smer, winner of the election, was formally asked to seek a majority in parliament by President Zuzana Čaputová last Monday.
