Bugar: If Centre-Right Had Formed Gov't, It Would Have Been Dead by Now
Bratislava, November 15 (TASR) – Any chance of forming a centre-right government after the March 2016 general election vanished the moment when the Slovak National Party (SNS) gave up on talks with a quintet of other rightist parties, but even if SNS had decided to join a rightist government, such a coalition wouldn’t have lasted long and would have probably collapsed by now, Most-Hid party chair Bela Bugar told TABLET.TV in an interview on Tuesday.
“It would have been necessary to bring together six political parties: SaS, OLaNO, Boris Kollar’s We Are Family, Most-Hid, Siet and SNS. And SNS said that it wouldn’t go into such a government,” said Bugar. “I, for one, maintain that even if SNS had gone along with it, such a government would have been non-existent by now. Can you imagine a governing coalition in which [OLaNO-NOVA leader Igor] Matovic called a representative of We Are Family a retard?” [Bugar was referring to a verbal duel between Matovic and Peter Pcolinsky from We Are Family. – ed. note]
According to Bugar, OLaNO-NOVA and SaS (Freedom and Solidarity) were attacking fellow centre-right parties in the run-up to the election. The end result was larger election gains for OLaNO and SaS at the cost of a worse result for the centre-right as a whole. “The election result [for the centre-right] was 40.4 percent. But two parties, SaS and OLaNO, were attacking via Facebook and other media KDH [the Christian Democrats], Most-Hid and Siet literally on a daily basis over us not wanting to pledge never to cooperate with Smer. And what happened? They took so many votes away from KDH that it failed to make it into Parliament. Instead of the 12 or 15 percent that Siet could have garnered, it received only 5.5, and we had only 6.5 instead of 8 or 8.5 [as predicted in polls],” said Bugar.
Following such election results, Most-Hid contributed towards the formation of the only feasible Government, one also able to guarantee the stability of Slovakia.
Even this coalition, however, has had to face a crisis of its own. Junior coalition party Siet had no caucus from the beginning, and, after a few months, five Siet MPs opted to jump ship and join the Most-Hid caucus. “These five lawmakers issued a statement that they wanted to continue to support the Government Manifesto as Independents. With this, however, they could have been accused of receiving something for their votes. After all, the Opposition declared through the mouth of [SaS] chairman [Richard] Sulik two weeks after the election that it would make our lives a living hell,” said Bugar.
“They take advantage even of things beyond what is imaginable. We were accused of participating in the rape of that girl from Clean Day [resocialisation centre] … That [statement] was from another lawmaker from SaS. And I could go on and on,” said Bugar, adding that the decision to form the coalition wasn’t easy. He underlined, however, that the stability of the governing Coalition has been successfully secured.
