BRATISLAVA, July 27, (WEBNOVINY) — A number of promises from election programs of individual political parties that are now in government will be hard to fulfill with regard to the desperate state of the public funds, Finance Minister Ivan Miklos (SDKU-DS) believes. In an interview for SITA news agency, Mr. Miklos mentioned as an example the promise of the SDKU-DS to extend the period of eligibility to the maternity contribution from six months to twelve months and increase the contribution from 55 percent of the gross monthly wage to a hundred percent. According to the finance minister, this will be carried out depending on the possibilities of the public funds and during the four-year election term of the current government. “We will try to fulfill election promises as much as possible in the four-year election term, also in connection with how the economy recover and how broken public finances become consolidated,” he stated.
The government wants to protect by a constitutional law the second pillar of the old-age pension system in the form it was launched in 2005. According to Mr. Miklos, the entry to the second pension pillar should be obligatory for young pension savers as they enter the job market, while an option to leave it and join the first, pay-as-you-go system could be debated. The finance minister rejected the idea of the former government of Robert Fico to guarantee return in the second pension pillar at the level of growth in pensions paid from the first pay-as-you-go pillar.
SITA