BRATISLAVA, December 30, (WEBNOVINY) — The opposition SMER-SD Chairman Robert Fico says there will be no early elections in case that the present government falls. “What if the government falls in January? They are really not far from that. Those conflicts inside are slowly becoming insurmountable and every day we learn of further and further ‚atrocities‘ that are committed. We are very well aware that there will be no early elections, such a short time after the elections, parliament would not pass a constitutional law on early election,” told Fico SITA news agency in an interview. If the government falls, and according to Fico, we need to talk about that more openly as time passes, the new government will probably be not constituted of the parties which create it in the present. “And what will be the problem with coalition potential then, who, when there will be a need of creating a new government, because we can not leave the country without a government. We will need to agree on something,” he added.
“If this government collapses, no new government can be created without SMER-SD. Everyone knows that today. Any discussion on the issue of SMER’s coalition potential will end,” he emphasized. Fico says that 0.7 percent is exactly the votes that LS-HZDS needed – or SMER needed maybe 1 or 2 percent [in elections in June — SITA note] and everything could have been different today. He thinks that a new government would probably be formed by a combination of the present governing coalition and opposition parties.
Fico says that everyone has a different way of doing politics. Some parties address voters by a positive program and by some content, and then there are parties which address the voter by taking strict antagonist position towards another political subject. “That could work on some few-percent group as well. But if there is a political party with a public support of approximately forty percent, as it is now, it is impossible to do politics of taking antagonist positions, by saying: we won’t go with these, we will go with these. When you have a party with 8-9 percent, it can do this for some time and that small group of voters that adhere to that small party can consider this as something they like,” he said.
According to Fico, before the June parliamentary election SMER-SD made a mistake by not sufficiently addressing its voters to come to vote. “There were towns and villages, where we had support of 60 percent of all voters but only 40 percent of voters in these towns and villages actually voted. If their turnout had been 60 percent, as was the average, the result for SMER-SD would really be somewhere near 40 percent,” he said. This is a lesson for the future that the party must not to underestimate. Above all they have to explain to the voters that if a party has high preferences and support, it does not necessarily have to mean that it will receive the same support in the elections.
SITA
