Parliament Rejects Constitutional Law on Snap Election

Parliament Rejects Constitutional Law on Snap Election
Bratislava, May 22 (TASR) – A snap parliamentary election won’t be held, as MPs on Tuesday didn’t support the Opposition’s draft constitutional law on shortening the election term, which would have set the date of the next parliamentary election at September 8, 2018, TASR learnt on the same day.

Only 57 MPs voted for the legal norm prepared by Opposition parties Freedom and Solidarity (SaS), OLaNO and We Are Family.
No coalition MPs enrolled for the debate that preceded the vote. The Opposition used this time to criticise the conditions and style in which Slovakia is governed. Coalition members responded only with occasional comments.
According to the Opposition, the Government is currently relying on a fragile, unrepresentative majority that has an unclear number, “and it [the majority] wouldn’t even be possible without the unpredictable votes of some non-affiliated MPs … All these facts prove that today’s parliamentary composition isn’t the result of the people’s will, not even the one from 2016,” said the Opposition.
The Opposition parties added that Slovakia was caught up in a wave of anti-government protests in February and March 2018, the greatest since 1989. “They were launched by the murder of an investigative journalist, and in connection with this, suspicions of ties between representatives of the Smer-SD governing party and people connected with organised crime appeared. A common feature of these protests is, in addition to expressing indignation at the murder of a journalist, expressions of dissatisfaction with the current Government and ever increasing calls for an early election,” reads the Opposition’s statement.