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Slovak president taps leftist premier to form government
AFP - Monday, June 14
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BRATISLAVA (AFP) - – Slovakia's president Sunday tapped incumbent Prime Minister Robert Fico to form a new government after his leftist party won the most votes in the general election.
Analysts said however that Fico's prospects of forging a government in the absence of support from centre-right runners-up are slim, leaving open the possibility they could yet form a ruling coalition.
With promises of generous social spending, Fico's Smer party came out on top in Saturday's vote with 34.8 percent but just 62 seats in the 150-seat parliament.
It was a centre-right grouping of four parties vowing to rein in public finances that scored a 79-seat majority.
"There are different political possibilities but I want to ask the election winner to form the government," President Ivan Gasparovic told journalists.
"I believe that the party that won such support from the people deserves the chance," he added.
Gasparovic was expected to meet Fico to formally charge him to form a new government by Monday at the latest, the Slovak news agency SITA reported.
Profile of Slovakia's Robert Fico
The president customarily first asks the head of the party which topped the vote to try to form a government.
"We are ready to try to form a government, to be a dominant political power for the next four years," Fico told reporters early on Sunday, calling the almost 35-percent support "an overwhelming victory".
"But we are also ready for the alternative of a centre-right government and we will be a tough opposition... so thorough that we don't give them more than a year," added Fico.
Leaders of the four centre-right parties holding a parliamentary majority together -- the liberal SDKU-DS, Freedom and Solidarity (SaS), the Christian Democrat KDH and the ethnic Hungarian party Most-Hid -- on Sunday ruled out any negotiations with Smer.
"I strictly rule out that any of the centre-right parties could team up with Smer," Grigorij Meseznikov, an analyst with the Bratislava-based Institute for Public Affairs, told AFP.
In that case, it would be up to SDKU-DS leader Iveta Radicova to try and form the new cabinet whose programme would be to get the Slovak car-industry-driven economy, battered by the global downturn, back into gear.
"Slovakia chose the path of responsibility that will help solve the problems of the country," Radicova told journalists after it emerged that the four-party coalition had won a majority.
Radicova, who will likely become Slovakia's first woman prime minister if Fico fails to form the cabinet, already led informal talks with the other three parties on Sunday.
With eyes on the emerging coalition, Meseznikov said Slovakia was experiencing a crucial political shift, "a return to the road it has been on since 1998, which led the country to the EU, NATO and far-reaching reforms."
Once boasting record economic growth -- 10.4 percent in 2007 and 6.4 percent in 2008 -- Slovakia's economy faced its first contraction of 4.7 percent in 2009, the year it joined the euro currency.
The Greek debt crisis was in the spotlight during the election campaign with some right-wing politicians dubbing Fico's spending promises "the road to Greece".
The country's budget deficit has swollen to 6.77 percent of output, more than twice the 3.0-percent limit for eurozone members, although debt remains well below a eurozone ceiling of 60 percent.
The result of the vote is almost a carbon copy of the election in the Czech Republic two weeks ago, where voters also sidelined populist left-wingers in favour of a three-party austerity-minded centre-right coalition.
The two countries formed a single federation -- Czechoslovakia -- between 1918 and 1993.
Hungary's Deputy Foreign Minister Zsolt Nemeth expressed relief Sunday at the likely end of "the profoundly anti-Hungarian government of Robert Fico...", the MTI agency reported.
Hungary's new conservative government and Fico's outgoing government, which includes Slovak nationalists, have been locked in a bitter war of words for weeks.
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