The result is a rebuke for Mr Fico, who has dominated politics in this country of 5m for much of the past decade
By B.C. | STRBSKE PLESO
IN A surprise upset, Robert Fico, Slovakia’s prime minister (pictured), lost the March 29th presidential run-off election to Andrej Kiska, a businessman and philanthropist. The result is a rebuke for Mr Fico, who has dominated politics in this country of 5m for much of the past decade. He presently leads a government with an outright majority in parliament. In the end, the vote was not particularly close with Mr Kiska taking 59% of the vote, compared with Mr Fico’s 41%. Just over half of eligible voters cast a ballot.
Mr Fico conceded defeat just 90 minutes after polls closed, when about half the votes had been counted. “Well, I have lost,” he said as he left his Smer party’s headquarters. In the two weeks before the run-off he had launched a series of brutal bulldozing attacks on his opponent, pulling out every trick in his varied, but dubious, political arsenal. He repeatedly (and falsely) alleged that Mr Kiska was secretly tied to the Church of Scientology, a narrative that sought to rally Slovakia’s significant number of Catholic social conservatives.
Mr Kiska is a former businessman turned philanthropist and this was his first run for public office. He founded two companies, Quatro and Triangel, which essentially provided high-interest loans by allowing consumers to buy appliances and home electronics in instalments. He later sold those firms to a bank before founding the Good Angel charity, which works with hospitals and provides help to families with children suffering from long-term illnesses and parents who have serious diseases. Mr Kiska’s central appeal among voters was that he was not Mr Fico, who finishes as both the most-liked and most-disliked politician in the country in opinion polls.
The Fico campaign had its signature absurd moment during the second presidential debate. “One of your firms is called Triangel, right?” Mr Fico asked Mr Kiska during the debate. “The sign of the Church of Scientology is a triangle. Mr Kiska you are interconnected with this sect and you have not negated any of the evidence I presented.” Mr Kiska, who spent a number of years in America, replied that the name of the company came from North Carolina’s Research Triangle region, formed by a group of prominent universities. To add to the foolishness, Slovakia’s state television (supposedly coincidentally) broadcast an alarmist documentary about Scientology three days before the vote.
Grigorij Mesežnikov, president of the Institute for Public Affairs in Bratislava, called the election campaign “unbefitting a democracy”. Commentators are drawing parallels between Mr Fico’s defeat and that of a former strongman, Vladimír Mečiar, who ran for president in 1999. Both elections, the argument goes, showed that Slovaks were wary of such significant power accumulating in a single person’s hands. Should he have won, Mr Fico and his party would have controlled parliament, the presidency and the country’s politically-charged judiciary.
For his part, Mr Kiska promises to help balance the Smer party’s dominance and bring dignity to the office. But in truth the presidential office has scant constitutional clout. He will replace Ivan Gašparovič, the current president and a Smer ally, on June 15th. In a related political development, Radoslav Procházka, an MP who finished a close third in the first round of presidential voting, used the 48-hour media moratorium that preceded the second round and blocked reporting on the presidential race to announce he was founding a new right-of-centre party. The presidential election may prove a political turning point in more ways than one.
