Fico, too, has caught the scent of defeat — only in his case, it's his own people doing the blowing

Viktor Orbán fell in the spring, Aleksandar Vučić a week ago, and now the sovereigntist/pro-Kremlin beam is creaking in Bratislava as well. On Tuesday morning, MP Roman Malatinec announced that he was leaving Rudolf Huliak's Rural Party and switching to the party being formed by former Environment Minister Tomáš Taraba. According to Slovak public broadcaster STVR, this means Robert Fico's governing coalition now holds only 75 secure votes in the 150-seat parliament, instead of 76 — in other words, it has lost its majority.

The Slovak situation, however, looks different from the Hungarian or Serbian ones. In Belgrade, students protested in the streets for two years, and on October 25 a student list ended Vučić's fourteen-year rule, whereas it is not the masses rising up against Fico, but pieces breaking off from his own camp — and the rebels stand well to his right. Taraba originally became a minister as a candidate of the Slovak National Party, while the Rural Party is regarded as a far-right formation.

The disintegration began in September, when the leader of the Slovak National Party, Andrej Danko, demanded Taraba's removal. Fico warned even then that this could lead to the loss of the majority, and even raised the prospect of early elections. Parliament eventually ousted Taraba with the votes of the nationalists and the opposition; he returned to his seat as an MP and in October began collecting signatures to found his new party, Taraba – Development of Slovakia. He was joined by Peter Slyško, who left Hlas, and now by Malatinec, who in 2023 had also entered parliament on Hlas's list.

The coalition's reaction reveals a lot about its own state of nerves. Huliak said he almost fell off his chair when Malatinec told him of his decision at nine o'clock on Tuesday morning, but he insisted the MP remained a solid part of the coalition. On the proposal of the governing parties, parliament decided not to vote on any pending legislation for the rest of the week, since it is unclear how many votes it can count on. Asked whether the government could survive without early elections, Tibor Gašpar, deputy speaker of parliament for Smer, said only that if he could predict the future, he would answer. The opposition Freedom and Solidarity party mockingly commented on the developments, saying that one traitor had betrayed another traitor and defected to a third.

Taraba's three MPs are not openly breaking with the government for now; they merely promise to vote for "sensible" laws, but nothing else. Slyško has already indicated that they will probably not support the abolition of postal voting from abroad, which had been one of the governing parties' favorite plans — not by accident: Slovaks living abroad vote overwhelmingly for the opposition, so scrapping postal voting is one of the key issues for Fico ahead of the next election. Meanwhile, the Constitutional Court also declared the government's amendment on crown witnesses unconstitutional, another blow to the government.

The polls are also running against the government. According to Focus's October survey, the liberal Progressive Slovakia stands at 23.1 percent and Fico's Smer at 17 percent, with the gap widening month by month. An opposition victory is nonetheless far from certain: according to Focus's calculations, Progressive Slovakia, KDH, SaS and the Democrats together would win only 72 seats, meaning they would also need to bring in Igor Matovič's movement to reach a majority. Early elections require a three-fifths parliamentary majority, which is nowhere in sight at the moment, while the regular election is scheduled for the autumn of 2027.

According to Roman Michelko, the Slovak National Party's parliamentary group leader, the coalition council must convene urgently and sort out the situation. For now, then, it is not students but offended nationalists setting the pace in Bratislava — yet the end result could be the same as in Budapest and Belgrade: the fall of a government that leans toward Moscow, because it is increasingly unable to control its own voting machine.

Ugar