Andrej Danko, leader of the junior coalition party, the far-right SNS, has been offered government posts currently held by the SNS to keep the coalition left-right of populist Prime Minister Robert Fico together.
“In these hard times it is important that nobody is sticks to his post and that everyone is capable of giving it up with one goal – to secure the functioning of the coalition in the future,” SNS party communication head Zuzana Skopcova was quoted as saying by the Slovak press agency TASR following a meeting between Danko and Fico on February 17.
SNS nominees Tomas Taraba, Martina Simkovicova and Dusan Keleti hold the ministries of culture, environment and sports and tourism.
Skopcova also praised their work, stating that the “Chairman of SNS is convinced that the government cannot fall, that early elections cannot be called, while he also thanks publicly all the SNS ministers.”
Fico’s coalition, which held the narrow majority of 79 in the parliament of 150 when formed in 2023, was left scrapping for votes after three rebel legislators left the SNS parliamentary grouping.
Recently, centre-left Hlas expelled two of its legislators who criticised Hlas converging with Smer’s and SNS radical national conservative agenda, including the purges carried out by Simkovicova at the country’s key cultural institutions.
Fico gave SNS and Hlas and ultimatum of February 17 to reach a deal with their rebelling legislators, signalling again early elections could be a real possibility for Smer, which managed to halt its faltering popularity after Fico further radicalised his rhetoric, aligning it with Kremlin talking points and loudly praising Trump’s overhaul of the public administration in the US.
SNS is struggling to reach a 5% parliamentary threshold in the polls, as bne IntelliNews covered.