Asylum reform + Critical infrastructure + Methane

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.