“It is ready, it was the joint work of the government coalition,” said the head of the Prime Minister’s advisers and MEP Erik Kaliňák on the broadcast of the pro-Russian internet radio Infovojna. He added that thanks go to the Ministries of the Interior and Foreign Affairs, which participated in the proposal.
This thank you is interesting in the context of the statement of the Minister of the Interior, Matúš Šutaj Eštok, who announced to the media before Wednesday’s government meeting that “this is not the topic”.
According to Kaliňák, the proposal was inspired by the Danish model, where only citizens with permanent residence in Denmark who are temporarily abroad can vote from abroad. If a citizen lives abroad for a long time and does not plan to return, he is removed from the voter list. According to Kaliňák, permanent residence in the country will not be required for the Slovak version.
According to Deputy Speaker of the Parliament Andrej Danek (SNS), this is an effort to “maintain the credibility of the electoral process”. “The correspondence election is a security risk. Everything will be under surveillance at the embassy,” said the SNS leader.
It is not yet certain whether the changes will go to the parliament as a parliamentary proposal, or whether the government itself will present them.
The opposition came with the information
At the beginning of the week, Progresivní Slovensko drew attention to the coalition plan with an appeal to the Prime Minister to publicly admit to the citizens about the intended change. The topic immediately dominated the public discourse in Slovakia, especially because such a change is supposed to take place without a debate with experts.
According to the opposition, the problem is also that the government has quite radically reduced the number of embassies – in Finland, for example, it has none. There is therefore a fear that elections would become unavailable for some citizens, especially in Canada or the United States of America.
In addition, the opposition is convinced that the coalition wants to help itself in particular, because Smér regularly comes up short in elections from abroad and ranks last. If only votes from abroad decided in September 2023, Robert Fico would only narrowly pass through the gates of the parliament.
