GO VOTING - SLOVAKIA's ELECTIONS


February 26:
How to use untraditional methods to make people vote in elections.

GO VOTING – about the parliamentary elections in Slovakia on Saturday, February 29.
As mentioned some days ago in my comments about Slovakia the Slovaks have parliamentary elections on February 29.  It is a an interesting and partly unpredictable election, because the political situation in the country is very different from the situation at the latest elections in 2016.
The first – and not new – problem in Slovak elections is that the turn-out, the participation, is often low. At the latest European elections in May 2019 only 22,74 %  voted. It was the lowest turn-out in all EU countries. Even though it was a bit higher than five years earlier.
The low turn-out was of particular importance when Slovakia in 2003 organised a referendum about membership of EU. No referendum in Slovakia is valid, if the participation is under 50 % - independently of how many Yes votes or No votes.  And no Slovak referenda before 2003 had succeeded due to this 50 % rule.  As all political parties agreed to vote YES to membership all forces and initiatives were mobilised to ensure a sufficiently high participation.  One of the efficient and untraditional means was an agreement with supermarkets that people would get 10 % reduction on all their purchases that day, if they could prove that they had voted!  It worked. The membership was agreed with a turn-out of just above 52 % - and with 94 % of those voting to vote YES.

The problem with a low turn-out is everywhere that extremist parties are often better in mobilising their voters than other parties. This means that they in a way get over-represented in parliament.
The second – and new -  issue is the murder in February on the 27 year old investigative journalist Jan Kuciak.  He was working on articles about the corruption in the country. The people behind his murder had proved relations to the governing party SMER, and the prime minister Robert Fico and the minister of interiour had to resign. The court case about the murder is ongoing and plays an important role in the election campaign.
The third – and new – factor is that Slovakia in March 2019 elected the 45 year old environment activist Zuzana Capotova as its president. She is the first female president and represents the party Progressive Slovakia.  She wants to change the law about the police to take it away from political influence. She is also very active in the fight for the climate, and she promotes the right of people with the same sex to marry, if they want to.  Though the president does not have a lot of formal power the fact that she was elected is a clear sign on what the voters want.
The Slovak Parliament – the National Council – has 150 seats. The latest election took place on March 5, 2016. The minimum age for voting is 21 years. And a party must have at least 5 % of the votes to get into parliament.
Altogether 15 parties try to get elected. It is expected that around 8 of them will succeed.

Not least the murder on the journalist and his girl friend in 2018 has made all parties use the slogan: A Polite Slovakia.
The themes in the ongoing election campaign have shown that nobody plans big reforms.
The most important themes have been:
No to extremism; fight against corruption; yes to democratic principles; ja to human rights. And everybody – including the present government – claim that they want to change the system which made the murder of the journalist possible.   Europe has not been an important topic in the campaign.



The social-democratic party ( that is what they call themselves ) SMER under the leadership of the new prime minister Peter Pellegrini is expected to continue to be the biggest party. But to lead a new government it needs coalition partners. What is interesting is, if it will try to get support from the right-wing parties, including the ultra-nationalist and semi-fascist party Our Slovakia with its leader Marian Kotleba – or it will try to get sufficient support from the parties in the middle and to the left.  In the present situation it is probably likely that they will choose the second option – to keep the ultra-nationalists outside influence.    This is the key question.



If you want to follow Slovak developments in serious media in English, here is the possibility:

SLOVAK SPECTATOR:  https://spectator.sme.sk

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