The Slovak National Party's (SNS) presidium on Tuesday, April 17, postponed the party's next congress from May 19 to an as-yet unspecified date in the autumn, citing organisational reasons, the TASR newswire reported, citing party leader Ján Slota, who added that he would not stand for re-election.
"Perhaps two or three people" will vie for the SNS chairmanship instead, he added, but did not proffer any names.
Meanwhile, SNS spokesperson Jana Benková said that the presidium accepted a letter from President Ivan Gašparovič in which he stated that he would not return to the SNS petition sheets the party had collected as part of an effort to call a referendum on the exclusive use of the Slovak language in official communications.
Gašparovič declined to call the referendum after it was revealed that only some 337,000 of 361,000 signatures on the petition sheets were valid; at least 350,000 signatures are needed to trigger a referendum. The SNS then urged the president to give the sheets back to the party so that it could collect additional valid signatures, but the president's spokesman, Marek Trubač, responded that no such return of petition sheets was possible as the petition drive was officially closed with the delivery of the sheets to the President's Office. The SNS earlier said that the president was thwarting people's right to engage in petitions.
Source: TASR
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
The Slovak Spectator cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information presented in its Flash News postings.
