A party headed by a pro-Kremlin figure came out top after securing more votes than expected in an election in Slovakia, preliminary results show, in what could pose a challenge to NATO and EU unity on Ukraine.

According to preliminary results released by Slovakia’s Statistical Office at 9 a.m. local time, Robert Fico’s populist SMER party won 22.9% of the vote.

Progressive Slovakia (PS), a liberal and pro-Ukrainian party won 17.9%.

Fico, a two-time former prime minister, now has a chance to regain the job but must first seek coalition partners as his party did not secure a big enough share of the vote to govern on its own.

  • @absquatulate
    link
    English
    211 year ago

    As usual CNN is making out of this a bigger deal than it actually is. These are slovak parliamentaries, so it’s not FPTP, therefore he didn’t “win” ( yet, anyway ). This seems to be just the social-democratic party’s growth from 19% in the last election to 23%, which would be in trend with growing conservative sentiment in europe. Besides, PS also grew from 8% to 18%, but that doesn’t generate as many clicks as “SLOVAKIA IS NOW PRO-RUSSIA!” so it’s barely a sidenote. Key takeaways are that they will have to seek coalition if they really want to pose a challenge to NATO policies.