Slovak Republic - Parliamentary elections - 29 February 2020
Parliamentary elections take place in Slovakia on 29 February 2020. Twenty-five parties are taking part. Slovakia has a unicameral National Council of the Slovak Republic (Národná rada Slovenskej republiky) with 150 seats. Members of the National Council are elected through a flexible-list proportional representation system to serve 4-year terms.
The 50-day moratorium on opinion polls ahead of elections does not apply to the 2020 parliamentary election. The Constitutional Court's decision from December 18 thus means that media will be able to continue publishing opinion poll results up to 14 days before election day. The parliament passed changes to the law on the election campaign amid much criticism at the end of November. President Zuzana Caputová, who criticised the law, vetoed it but MPs overrode her veto. She turned to the Court thereafter.
In the presidential election in March 2019, Slovaks elected their new head of state –the first female president Zuzana Caputová. She has been characterised as pro-western, pro-European, liberal, environmental activist and attorney.
Slovakia was deeply shaken by the 2017 murder of investigative reporter Jan Kuciak. The 27-year-old journalist and his fiancée were gunned down in his home near Bratislava as Kuciak was preparing a story on ties between Slovak politicians, local businessmen and the Italian mafia. Caputova, who made her reputation as a pro-environment lawyer and anti-graft crusader, took part in the resulting protest that forced then-Prime Minister Robert Fico to resign.
A 42-year-old man received a 15-year jail sentence 30 December 2019 in a plea deal for facilitating the murder of Slovak investigative journalist Jan Kuciak in 2018, a court spokeswoman said. It was the first sentence so far handed down in the trial over the fatal shooting of Kuciak and his fiancee, Martina Kusnirova, both aged 27, at their home near Bratislava. The case triggered mass protests over corruption in Slovakia, and Prime Minister Robert Fico was forced to resign. Four other people are on trial over the killings, including a businessman whom Kuciak was investigating in the course of his work on connections between organized crime and politics in Slovakia.
A controversial political leader of the 1990s is planning a political comeback. Slovakia's prime minister Vladimir Meciar was elected, and brought down, three times between 1994 and 1998, overseeing a period so tainted by violations of the rule of law that the country's bid to join NATO and the EU was put on ice. Meciar finally left politics in 2012. At the end of October he said he was going to run on Slovenská Liga's (Slovak League) slate. The party was founded by Meciar's long-time colleague Tibor Cabaj. However, the former PM withdrew his name at the last minute – on November 29 - when the party was to submit its list of candidates for the 2020 elections.
The country is ideologically divided, with a large share of Slovak people also supporting the government's nationalist and populist stance. The coalition government, which is made up of Social Democrats (SMER), a Hungarian minority party and a far-right party, is known to disseminate divisive propaganda. The Social Democrats, in particular, have repeatedly railed against migrants, US billionaire George Soros, the EU, investigative journalists and Caputova.
Whipping up anti-Roma sentiment during political campaigns has long been a favourite “sport” in Slovak politics. Such tactics were especially popular in the wild 1990s after the fall of communism, and then again in the 2010s before Europe’s migrant crisis gave populists and nationalists a new target for vitriol. After it became clear that Slovakia would not be overrun with migrants, the Roma minority once again became the target of hate.
Prime Minister and Smer-SD election leader Peter Pellegrini has told TASR in an interview that he wants the general election campaign to change into a dialogue on the future of the country and on the no-frills solutions that Slovakia has to hand. Nevertheless, Pellegrini is afraid that issues that will polarise society will in fact prevail during the campaign. “It will probably be about emotions rather than about a competition of ideas. We need to prepare for this and fight for people’s trust,” said Pellegrini.
Slovaks began voting in a general election on 29 February 2020 with the governing populists fighting for survival amid outrage over the 2018 gangland-style murder of a journalist whose stories exposed high-level corruption plaguing the eurozone country. A allegedly hit ordered by a businessman with connections to politicians, the killing of Jan Kuciak, which also took the life of his fiancee Martina Kusnirova, had become a lightning rod for public outrage at graft in public life. Hit hard by the fallout of the murder, most surveys suggest that Robert Fico's governing populist-left Smer-Social Democracy (Smer-SD) party was running neck-and-neck with OLaNO, a surging centre-right opposition party focused on combatting corruption. OLaNO even outpaced Smer-SD by 3.5 percent in a last-minute AKO/Focus agency opinion survey published this week in the neighboring Czech Republic to bypass a pre-election polling ban in Slovakia.
The center-right Ordinary People party emerged victorious in Solvakia's general election, with voters responding to the party's pledge to push anti-corruption reform following the death of murdered journalist Jan Kuciak. According to final results released by the Statistics Office, the Ordinary People group secured 25% of the vote and 53 seats in the 150-seat parliament. The governing center-left Smer-Social Democracy party, led by former populist Prime Minister Robert Fico, won 18.3%, or 38 seats. The discourse during these elections was dominated by the 2018 double murder of journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancee, Martina Kusnirova. Kuciak has reported on high-level corruption within the government. The murder led to nationwide street protests, forcing Fico to resign. However, the Smer coalition remained in power, under the leadership of Peter Pellegrini.
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