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Dear reader,
East and West are looking to Slovakia with their breath held on Saturday. In an early ballot, the people there will elect a new parliament. The term directional election is worn out, but in this case, it applies.
The question is whether Slovakia will clearly remain in the Western alliance against Putin’s war in Ukraine or increasingly break away, following the example of Hungary. Moscow hopes for the latter. Russian troll factories have focused massively on the Slovak population during the election campaign because solidarity with Kyiv is crumbling particularly clearly there.
According to the latest polls, there are signs of a neck-and-neck race between Robert Fico’s once social democratic and now national populist SMER-SD party and the liberal Progressive Slovakia (PS) led by MEP Michal Šimečka. The PS had long lagged well behind SMER-SD, but was catching up and, in one of four representative polls, was recently even just ahead of Fico’s party at 18 percent.
However, both parties would need coalition partners to form a government. The Hlas party, which is polling at around 13 percent and is a breakaway from Fico, would be available to both the SMER-SD and the liberal PS. In addition, Šimečka could possibly count on some smaller bourgeois parties, but all of them will have to fight to even get into the new National Council.
The election campaign was extremely toxic, even degenerating into fisticuffs between top politicians. President Zuzana Čaputová, who until her election was herself a member of the PS, expressed understanding for the fact that Slovaks were disappointed with politics and the rough election campaign. But not all politicians are like that, she said. She would like Slovakia to continue to be respected in the West as a reliable partner.
Your
Hans-Jörg Schmidt
Feature
Asylum reform: Dispute over crisis regulation continues to smolder
The dispute over the crisis regulation in the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) continues. After Germany, as expected, cleared the way for a compromise, Italy reacted with skepticism. Germany had changed the legal text, more time was needed for the examination, it was said after a meeting of EU interior ministers in Brussels.
Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi “requested time to examine the contents of this proposal in more detail, including from a legal point of view”, Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said in Berlin. According to Italian media, Piantedosi left the Brussels meeting early and traveled back to Rome. A formal decision was therefore not reached.
Faeser: ‘Excellently negotiated compromise’
The Spanish presidency and the EU Commission nevertheless expressed optimism. “There are no major obstacles left, the formal vote will follow in the next few days”, said Interior Commissioner Ylva Johansson. Spain’s Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska expressed a similar view, saying that they were very close to reaching an agreement soon. Only a few details remain to be clarified.
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