Page 16 - CE Outlook Regions 2022

parliamentary elections.

The new party may also be good news for rightwing parties because
there will be a redistribution of power on the left, meaning that political
forces will be more fragmented.

This might result in more leftwing parties failing to pass the five-percent
threshold necessary for being elected to the parliament.

However, claims that the new party will support an “ethnic nation-state”
is a conscious appeal to rightwing voters. According to some analysts,
the new party is using the so-called “catch-all” strategy that employs
rhetoric appealing to both left and right-wing voters.

1.6 Politics - Slovakia

The year 2021 was a challenging year for the Slovak coalition
government, which went through a deep government crisis leading
to the swap of seats between the former Slovak Prime Minister Igor
Matovic and former Finance Minister Eduard Heger. Coalition
partners´ quarrels during 2021 gave the opposition parties,
especially the Smer-SD of former Prime Minister Robert Fico, and
non-parliamentary party Voice-SD of former Prime Minister Peter
Pellegrini, time and space to increase their electoral potential in the
polls.

Since the beginning of 2021, both parties have been very loud in
requesting snap elections. Although Fico´s petition for snap
elections submitted in mid-2021 was declared unconstitutional, he
has not given up and at the end of 2021 he called on President
Zuzana Caputova to act and request Heger´s government to take
responsibility of the worsening of the epidemic situation in the
country and resign.

The analysts expect the Slovak government crisis to continue in
2022, amplified by further attempts by the non-government parties to
undermine the government. Moreover, it seems Fico´s and
Pellegrini´s hard work has paid out. As shown by the poll carried out
by the AKO agency for the Slovak News Agency SITAM in

16 CE Outlook 2022 www.intellinews.com