The future of Prime Minister Eduard Heger’s government in Slovakia hangs in the balance after a former coalition partner, the Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) party, tabled a motion of censure on Thursday, which, if approved by the rest of Parliament, could lead to three different scenarios.
«This government has lost its raison d’être,» said SaS leader Richard Sulik, for whom it is Boris Kollár, head of one of the coalition parties – We Are Family – and president of Parliament, who leads an executive that does not know how to solve people’s problems and is also harming the country.
«We must end this suffering as quickly as possible,» said Sulik, who has advanced that his party will not pressure the independent deputies to reach the 76 votes needed to overthrow the current government, reports the Slovak newspaper ‘Denník N’.
It is scheduled to be next week when the motion of censure presented by SaS will be debated in the National Council of Slovakia. The current government coalition is made up of 70 seats, six less than those needed to save itself from this initiative, so it will have to appeal to the seven independent deputies.
However, Heger is confident of succeeding in the challenge presented by the opposition and has assured that he cannot imagine «how those deputies who opt for the initiative of his former partner could look at themselves later in the mirror».
In case the chamber votes for the fall of the government, there are three scenarios that could occur. The first is for the parties to negotiate a new coalition, for early elections to be called, or for the country’s president, Zuzana Caputova, to appoint an interim executive.
Caputova herself already criticized the Executive this week and warned that its way of acting was posing a risk to democracy. «This government turns crises into a drama (…) If it cannot change its way of governing, it would be better to let the people elect their representatives again,» she said.
The scenario of early elections would benefit the left-wing opposition led by Smer’s Social Democrats, whose leader Robert Fico has been up to three times prime minister, and Hlas, according to polls.
