BRATISLAVA, December 7, (SITA) — Jozef Centes will be the ruling coalition’s candidate for the post of prosecutor general in the open vote, too, said chairman of the ruling coalition member MOST-HID Bela Bugar following the unsuccessful secrete ballot on Tuesday. He is glad that coalition partners respected the agreement from Monday and did not cast their ballots and thus made the election of a new prosecutor general impossible.
Six deputies from the coalition camp, who in the first round of the second ballot did not support Centes, hid behind anonymity, according to Bugar, and do not have the courage to stand up and say that it is they who did not support the coalition candidate. He assumes that when the coalition quartet changes the secret ballot into an open vote, they will vote in line with the coalition agreement. He stressed that the coalition agreement is effective only for a government headed by Iveta Radicova (SDKU-DS) as prime minister, and potential re-election of incumbent Prosecutor General Dobroslav Trnka would mean an end of the coalition. “Definitely. If someone counts on casting a vote, the prime minister falling and let us move on, they have miscalculated it,” Bugar told the press on Tuesday.
Now, the coalition will have to prepare legislative drafts to change the election procedure of the prosecutor general to a public vote. A group of deputies in particular from the Parliamentary Constitutional and Legal Committee will prepare the bill until January 15. Bugar rejects statements of opposition leader Robert Fico, according to whom making the vote public will restrict the freedom of individual deputies.
The MOST-HID leader further said that relations inside the coalition have not been very pleasant, as the parties have accused each other of breaching the coalition agreement in the vote on new prosecutor general last Thursday. He did not want to speculate about the reasons why some of coalition deputies voted for Trnka instead of for the coalition candidate Jozef Centes last week.
Earlier on Tuesday, Slovak lawmakers failed to elect the new prosecutor general for the next seven-year term in a secret ballot, in line with expectations. MPs for the governing coalition did not cast their ballots and thus none of the candidates won the necessary simple majority of the votes.
Of the 150 deputies who took over their ballot papers, 71 voted for the incumbent Prosecutor General Dobroslav Trnka while the ruling coalition’s joint candidate Jozef Centes did not win a single vote. Seventy-nine deputies of the coalition did not cast their ballots.
SITA