After the 30 September elections, Slovakia is gradually forming a ruling red-brown coalition, which will not play into the hands of those sympathetic to the EU or Ukraine, according to POLITICO.
On Tuesday, Peter Pellegrini, chairman of the Social Democratic party Hlas (“Voice”), which came third in the election with 14.7 per cent, announced that Hlas would only negotiate with former PM Robert Fico’s left-populist Smer party, which won the election with 23 per cent, as well as nationalists from the Slovak National Party (SNS), which scored 5.6 per cent. Together, the three parties hold 79 seats in the country’s 150-seat parliament.
Peter Pellegrini, Fico’s former Smer associate before he left for Hlas in 2020, said the party’s governing council had decided to end even informal talks with other parties that won seats in the election, including the liberal Progresívne Slovensko (Progressive Slovakia, PS), which came second with 18 per cent. Pellegrini said:
The outcome of negotiations must be a coalition agreement that defines how ministries will be split, and that identifies the priorities of the next coalition government.
The Hlas chairman explained that he did not want to join a liberal-conservative coalition with the PiS and the Christian Democrats (CDH, 6.8 per cent) because “cooperation with the liberals and conservatives would be full of conflicts”. Pellegrini added:
We are convinced that we made the right choice in this chaos and decline.
In his election programme, Fico promised to end Slovakia’s military support for Ukraine and to oppose sanctions against Russia.
