BRATISLAVA, October 28, (WEBNOVINY) — On Friday, independent MP Igor Matovic applied for registration of his political party called Ordinary People and Independent Personalities at the Ministry of Interior. He confirmed this for SITA news agency. Through this party, Matovic wants to enable independent candidates to compete for parliamentary seats in elections. „We decided to simulate an independent candidate list,“ Matovic explained the purpose of the new party.
Every party can nominate 150 candidates on its list for parliamentary elections. Matovic announced that the first one hundred names on the party’s list of candidates will be reserved for independent personalities and that have nothing in common with politics whereby candidates of smaller parties can fill some of the remaining fifty places. „Large political parties wanted to outmaneuver the small ones by early elections. We said to ourselves we will not let them do so, “ said the leader of the Ordinary People group in the Slovak Parliament. He reiterated that party members will be on the list of candidates only to add color, exclusively below the first hundred names.
Matovic explained he was establishing his own party in response to the failure to amend the election law to allow people who do not want to be candidates of a political party to stand for election to parliament. He wanted anyone who can gather 5,000 signatures and pay a hundred euro deposit to be able to run, but the bill had no chance.
Four members of the ‘Ordinary People’ group made it to parliament in 2010, on the party list of the neoliberal SaS party, although they were the last four names on the candidate list. Also in the March 2012 early parliamentary elections, Matovic wants to be last name on the party list. The group began collecting signatures needed to register the party over the summer. They eventually managed to get more than 13,000 signatures, more than the necessary 10,000. After the registration application is submitted, the Interior Ministry has fifteen days to examine the new party’s statutes and to decide on its registration.
SITA
