Premier Rejects Sulik's Criticism of Government Measures

Bratislava, November 11 (TASR) – Prime Minister Igor Matovic (OLaNO) on Wednesday rejected criticism by Economy Minister Richard Sulik (Freedom and Solidarity/SaS), who said that the Government hasn’t kept its promises to ease measures after countrywide testing and has extended the state of emergency instead.

Sulik also doesn’t like the proposal for so-called community testing, according to which schools, churches, sports clubs and hotels should provide across-the-board testing. Matovic emphasised that all five members for SaS at the crisis management team session voted in favour of extending the state of emergency as well as community testing.

“I’d also like to have a holiday and post Facebook statuses in these difficult times, when people are dying every day and thousands of others are in hospital with COVID-19,” said Matovic, reproaching Sulik for not attending crisis management team meetings in person and sending deputies instead.

“He [Sulik] sends five of his representatives there; they vote for a 90-day state of emergency, all five voted for community testing, and then he criticises his own party members via Facebook while on holiday,” said Matovic. “It’s not worth commenting on,” added the prime minister.

At the same time, Matovic called on Sulik to propose a way of reducing the number of infected people and keeping the number of new cases per day below 500 while leaving everything open. “I’m giving a public promise that if Richard Sulik can by Sunday come up with a solution that will ensure that Slovakia won’t have more than 500 people on average per day tested positive with RT-PCR tests over seven days and at the same time allow restaurants, theatres, cinemas, churches, sports clubs and gyms to be open as of December 1, I’ll hand over the entire management of the coronavirus crisis in Slovakia to him from then on,” said Matovic.