2024-04-07 14:21:20
The restaurant on the banks of the Danube, which Peter Pellegrini turned into an election headquarters, seemed to predetermine the outcome of the presidential race. It has a direct view of Bratislava Castle. The head of state no longer lives there, but it was once the temporary residence of the first Slovak president, Michal Kováč. Václav Havel, the last president of Czechoslovakia, also had his office there.
The head of the parliament and the ruling party Hlas Peter Pellegrini convincingly dominated the race for the presidency, defeating former foreign minister Ivan Korčok by about six percentage points.
But before nine o’clock Saturday evening, the winner’s election staff in Bratislava did not yet appear so celebratory. The guests and politicians were just getting together, and Pellegrini admitted that he was nervous at that moment and claimed that “no matter how the election turns out, the one who loses loses his honor”.
In Ivan Korčok’s bastion in the Stará tržnica in the city center, on the other hand, optimism prevailed from the beginning. Actors, celebrities, former politicians and a large number of young supporters came.
But the quick counting of votes after ten in the evening started to overturn the atmosphere. Within about an hour and a half after the polls closed, it was clear. “Pelle na Hrad”, chanted the MPs from Pellegrini’s ruling party Hlas in the economical space of the restaurant, there was also the Slovak national anthem. Then they waited anxiously for their chairman over champagne toasts.
Pellegrini descended from the VIP zone among the journalists after midnight. “I will respect the foreign policy anchoring of the country, but I will always defend mainly the people of Slovakia. I will be the president of all,” he said. He repeated that Slovakia must remain on the side of peace, not war. Saying that he will be a president of peace and will not send a single soldier to Ukraine, the current speaker of the parliament resigned a few days after the first round of elections. It was strikingly reminiscent of last year’s presidential elections in the Czech Republic, when the topic was raised by the head of the ANO movement, Andrej Babiš.
“The spread of fear resonated quite a bit in the campaign and the strongest fear was the fear of war. Pellegrini led the campaign in a confrontational manner and made Korčok a warmonger,” Peter Bárdy, editor-in-chief of the Slovak server Aktuality.sk, told Aktuálně.cz about the results of the second round. These statements probably worked on the voters of the pro-Russian Štefan Harabin or the government party Smér or Hlas.
Mobilization of government supporters
Pellegrini’s success was largely determined by a record voter turnout of 61 percent, the highest since the presidential election in 1999. This year, turnout in the second round was even almost 20 percentage points higher than in the last presidential election five years ago.
According to post-election analyses, Pellegrini managed to mobilize more supporters than Korčok, and his victory was significantly helped by the voters of the governing parties. “Roughly 1.4 million people for Pellegrini and 1.2 million for Korčok are huge numbers. With the numbers with which Korčok finished second behind Pellegrini today, he would have won the last election,” noted Bárdy.
According to the Slovak newspaper SME, it turned out that Pellegrini has a larger pool of votes among coalition voters than Korčok among opposition supporters. Prime Minister Roberto Fico’s words were also in that spirit when he spoke to journalists at Pellegrini’s headquarters to write in the headlines of the articles that the presidential election as a referendum on the government turned out well.
“Now you could easily say: ‘This is how it’s done, damn it,'” were Fico’s first words to Pellegrini at a press conference at the election headquarters, where he came to support him. He was referring to the exclamation that was heard last year in the staff of the Direction party after winning the parliamentary elections.
Fico clearly supported the winner Pellegrini on Saturday. At the same time, he did not show his sympathies that much before the elections. Both politicians parted ways in 2020 after losing the election. The current speaker of the parliament turned away from Fico and founded his own party Hlas with a group of loyalists. Pellegrini then tried to distance himself from Fico.
“Although Fico and the head of another coalition party, Andrej Danko, did nothing for Pellegrini’s win, the fact that people considered him a government candidate, not just a Hlas candidate, apparently helped,” said journalist Bárdy. Until it was clear who would win, there was speculation about Fico’s arrival. Pellegrini said upon his arrival at the staff that the prime minister has his own program.
At the press conference, he himself thanked Fico. “The government coalition will remain stable. The Voice party will continue to fulfill the election program,” he added.
The closest fight in history did not take place
Before the second round, polls by sociological agencies predicted a very close fight between the two candidates. The predictions were not confirmed. In the end, Pellegrini and Korčok were separated by roughly 6.5 percent. Pellegrini won most of the Slovak districts except for Korčok’s bastions from the first round.
Journalists also predicted a close fight for Hungarian voters. In the end, however, it was Pellegrini who won them over to his side. For example, in the Komárno district in the south of the country, where more than half of the population is the Hungarian minority, Pellegrini won by 27 percentage points.
According to Bárdy, Pellegrini could also have been helped by the support he received in recent days from Slovak celebrities and influencers who joined the campaign, even though the moratorium was already running. He was supported, for example, by the rapper Rytmus.
No one in the Czech Republic has even attempted that. The analyst described the key moment of the Slovak elections (April 5, 2024)
Spotlight News – Martin Ehl. | Video: Oldrich Neumann