Centre-right coalition set to take over in Slovakia

Slovakia's governing Smer-Social Democracy have boosted their support by six percent in the weekend's general election to win 62 seats, far and away the most popular party. But current Prime Minister Robert Fico will most likely not return to power, as support for his two hard-right coalition partners slumped, and all four centre-right opposition parties have ruled out working with his centre-left group.

On Monday (14 June), Slovak President Ivan Gasparovic approached Mr Fico, asking him to form a government without a majority in the 150-seat chamber. However, despite the president's move, the opposition parties, with a total of 79 seats, have already launched coalition talks among themselves.

Smer won 36 percent of the vote, almost double the next closest party, the conservative Slovak Christian and Democratic Union (SDKU-DS) of sociology professor Iveta Radicova, the likely next prime minister, who won 15.4 percent, down some three percent from the last general election in 2006. The free-market liberals of Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) - who are strongly pro-business but also favour drugs liberalisation and same-sex marriage - came second on 12.1 percent, followed by the country's second Christian Democratic party, the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH) of former EU education commissioner Jan Figel on 8.5 percent, and Most-HID, an ethnic Hungarian grouping, on 8.1 percent.

The four parties should have little trouble working together, although there are frictions between the two Christian Democratic groups.

Mr Fico's main coalition partner, the extreme-right Slovak National Party, slid 11 seats down to nine on 5.07 percent - only barely above the five-percent threshold required to enter the Narodna rada, while the nationalists of former prime minister Vladimir Meciar, the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (LS-HZDS), won no seats at all.

The priorities of what will likely be a highly fiscally conservative government will focus on slashing spending in what is already the poorest country in the euro area. The country's budget deficit was 6.8 percent in 2009, well above the three-percent limit for eurozone members.

Euobserver