Fico’s presidential Waterloo
Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico will have to swallow a bitter political pill in the next few days after he saw his presidential dream vanquished by a man he had aggressively targeted as a greenhorn and an usurer, and accused of being a Scientologist. Fico was hoping his ruling Smer party could control all the key political posts in the country. Instead he was defeated by a man without any previous political experience.
It was not philanthropist and businessman Andrej Kiska who stopped Smer from taking over the country, but rather the people who believed it could not possibly be good for the country for one party to control the government, parliament and presidential palace, not to talk about the army of political nominees who got their jobs at all levels of state administration as parts of Smer’s significant patronage system.
This was no gentle blow that Fico received on March 29, as the Smer leader has experienced his harshest political defeat in a decade after failing to get anywhere near to Kiska’s 59 per cent.
For the full story, please visit The Slovak Spectator.
