Parliament Kills Bill to Reduce Quorum for Referenda

Bratislava, October 27 (TASR) – The quorum (minimum percentaqe of voters) required to make referenda valid won’t be lowered and will remain at the current 50 percent, as Parliament on Thursday rejected the Constitutional amendment sponsored by Boris Kollar’s We Are Family opposition party.

We Are Family proposed to decrease the threshold to 30 percent, reflecting on the fact that only a single plebiscite (on EU membership in 2004) out of eight has been successful in the modern history of Slovakia.

In 2015, a similar proposal was tabled by opposition party OLaNO-NOVA, which unsuccessfully proposed decreasing the threshold to 20 percent. Interior Ministry Robert Kalinak (Smer-SD) stated in February 2015 that a quorum decrease would mean that the minority would decide the destiny of the majority. He further stated that the current threshold is in place due to practical reasons, because it is always the majority that should make decisions.