Slovak Elections and Politics | Fico the Fourth 🇸🇰

[Former President tack50]

Wait, how on Earth is Kotleba-L'SNS in third? Granted, it's "only" 10% but that is still a ton of support for a literal neo-nazi party!

[Former President tack50]

Wait there have been talls of Smer-L'SNS cooperation? Aren't they literal nazis?

How and why?

[Former President tack50]

Got Dobrá voľba at 71%. No idea who they are tbh, other than that they seem to be polling below the threshold

[Former President tack50]

Given the government has a supermajority, have they announced any sort of constitutional changes they want to make?

[Former President tack50]

Social Democratic and left wing parties in general being rather socially conservative and corrupt seems to be a trend all across Eastern Europe tbh.

Not an unbreakable one mind you (Poland's left seems to be pretty good for instance even if its election results are not great) but certainly a trend nontheless.

I assume this is a holdover from communism and that said left wing parties are the parties for nostalgics and apologists of the old regime?

[Former President tack50]

* I'm still impressed by the absurdity of the Fico III cabinet. Coalition negotiations took all of 18 days and it consisted of:
- Smer
- SNS, a party whose ex-leader (until 2013) was fond of drunk rants about how Hungarians are "a tumor on the body of Slovak nation"
- Most-Híd, a party that whose voter base consited of some anti-Fico urbanites, but mostly ethnic Hungarians
- #Sieť, a party led by a guy who proclaimed himself the leader of anti-Fico opposition

I definitely wonder how a party led by an anti-Hungarian leader in the near past; was able to join a government with the ethnic Hungarian party lol

[Former President tack50]

Fundamentally, nationalist populism in any form is incompatible with the idea of close European cooperation, random cranks notwithstanding.

Fun fact: Those random cranks are one of the routine contenders for third place in Malta's EU elections

They even got a whopping 3.2% of the vote in 2019, which sounds like little but by Maltese standards is massive!

[Former President tack50]

Can the president unilaterally fire the prime minister? I imagine it is one of those "emergency powers" that are never meant to be used? (if it even exists at all)

Slovak politics look like a comical headache tbh

[Former President tack50]

So uh, who does the Slovak PM side with in this anti-corruption civil war?

Plus hey, maybe all the corrupt people will arrest each other and throw each other in jail so try to look at the bright side /s

[Former President tack50]

Riddle me this (no, seriously, this is an actual question if anyone knows). How is it possible for the same country to have...

the lowest income inequality in the OECD (yay!)



but also the second highest regional inequality in the OECD?

Presumably within each region everyone earns the same, but the rich regions are much richer than the poor ones

Though tbh I am very surprised at that result. Is provincial Slovakia genuinely that poor? Is regional inequality really so much worse than that of say, Italy?

[Former President tack50]

More importantly, his welfare package got passed after all, thanks to the votes of Kotleba's neo-Nazi ĽSNS. This has caused much consternation to put it mildly, and there have been rumours about President rejecting it on principle to maintain the cordon sanitaire, but I don't see that happening. She's smarter than that.

I really need to stop predicting things. She vetoed the law and sent it to the Constitutional Court to examine the legality of the expedited legislative process used to pass it, including the lack of any consultations with civil servants from affected ministries, experts and the public.

https://twitter.com/jeestunautre17/status/1539647057216303106

I assume this means it passed after all? What more can you tell us about that? Is the cordon sanitaire dead? (also for some reason I thought L'SNS was basically now gone as it's polling at basically 0%?)

[Former President tack50]

Small question, has the old cordon sanitaire against L'SNS fallen, since it seems Republika is not subject to it anymore?