Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico won general elections with a weaker-than-expected outcome, as an anti-refugee message helped two nationalist groups gain seats with six other parties in a potentially hung parliament.
Fico’s SMER party, which pledged to raise living standards and protect the nation against Europe’s migrant crisis, lost its majority. It took 28.3 percent, or 49 of parliament’s 150 seats, according to results based on 99 percent of districts counted yesterday. That was well below the 44 percent he won in a 2012 ballot.
The pro-business SaS party was second with 12.1 percent, or 21 seats, while two nationalist parties won a combined 29 mandates, the results showed.
Photo: Reuters
With three parties refusing to rule with Fico, he will struggle to create a coalition that controls a majority in parliament.
Hopes among a group of center-right parties for a repeat of 2010, when Fico won elections, but was outmaneuvered by smaller parties who took power, looked futile, as the five such groups controlled only 72 seats together.
The 51-year-old prime minister vowed to lead talks to form a new ruling coalition.
“Our duty has emerged to try to create a sensible government, but it won’t be easy to avoid the probability of early elections,” Fico said almost seven hours after voting ended.
He said that he had not ruled out cooperating with any party.
The biggest surprises in the elections were the collapse of the opposition SIET party, which was running second behind SMER in pre-election opinion polls, but plunged to eighth place, winning only 5.6 percent.
The Slovak Nationalist Party, which ruled with Fico from 2006 to 2010 came in fourth, with 8.6 percent, or 15 parliamentary seats.
The People’s Party, led by Marian Kotleba, who has been arrested for allegedly inciting racial hatred, was close behind with 14 mandates.
Kotleba has not been convicted of any crime.
At the center of the election campaign were doubts over the future of the EU. The country of 5.4 million has been struggling to weigh the benefits of its 2009 euro adoption against obligations such as sheltering migrants and helping Greece.
Fico has joined neighbors Poland and Hungary in denouncing an EU plan to redistribute refugees in the bloc.
That, along with the UK’s potential “Brexit” and Greece’s economic woes, are set to dominate Slovakia’s stint at the EU’s rotating presidency, which is to begin in July.
Despite having presided over booming growth, which accelerated to 4.2 percent in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, Fico’s support has fallen since he took power. He struggled to maintain popularity as his message of keeping immigrants out of Slovakia collided with public discontent over underfunded services, which included strikes by teachers and healthcare workers.
SMER’s focus on migrants backfired, as it boosted support for the more radical groups that took up the anti-refugee cause, said Otilia Dhand, an analyst at Teneo Intelligence in Brussels.
Kotleba, a former high-school teacher, has praised Jozef Tiso, president of the Slovak fascist satellite state during World War II, a regime that sent tens of thousands of Jews to Nazi concentration camps.
The SaS, Olano-Nova and We Are Family parties all said after the results came out that they would refuse to work with Fico in government. If they stick to that vow, lacking a majority of their own, it would mean any government would have to include both SMER and the Nationalists.
Most of the other parties have refused to rule with the People’s Party.
“This may well end in early elections,” Dhand said.
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