Slovakia is in the midst of nine months of elections. Voters will have to vote four times between September 2023 and June 2024. They have already elected a new Slovak parliament. Robert Fico made a grand comeback and became prime minister for the fourth time.
In March and April, Slovakia elected a new president to replace Jujuna Čaputova, the first female president in Slovak history. After fierce battles and high voter turnout, former prime minister and Fico ally Peter Pellegrini will become Slovakia’s new president. And in June, Slovak voters will elect 15 members of the European Parliament.
With this in mind, no one should be surprised that there is basically no campaigning going on in the weeks leading up to the European elections. There are only a few billboards visible on the streets, and voter turnout in June is not expected to be very high after such a difficult year.
That’s nothing new. It has been 20 years since Slovakia joined the European Union. Since then we have voted in four European elections. Slovakia had the lowest voter turnout of all EU countries, even after new Balkan countries such as Croatia and Bulgaria joined the EU.
The lowest voter turnout was 13% in 2014. Five years later, voter turnout was higher but still just above 22%. This shows that Slovak voters either do not pay much attention to the European Parliament or do not believe that a small number of Slovak lawmakers can bring about much change, despite two of the Slovak lawmakers recently serving as vice-president of the European Parliament.
Debate over Slovakian politics over the past few months has focused on the new government, which has quickly followed in the footsteps of previous governments in Hungary and Poland. Robert Fico was accused of corruption during his previous term. He resigned in 2018 following the largest protests in recent Slovak history, sparked by the killings of Slovak journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová.
