Slovakia goes to vote today for the run-off of the presidential elections in which it will decide whether the populist prime minister Robert Fico will be forced into an uncomfortable cohabitation with a pro-EU liberal exponent for five years or will have his faithful ally as president, consolidating a nationalist and pro-Russian drift that has begun last year.
In fact, a head-to-head is looming between a former prime minister and current president of Parliament, Peter Pellegrini, and a former foreign minister, Ivan Korcok, who won the first round two weeks ago. Four recent polls by renowned opinion polling institutes do not predict any clear winner but agree that a high turnout would favor Pellegrini. In the first round, voter participation was 52%.
The duel is the closest since the direct election of the head of state was introduced in Slovakia in 1999. The 60-year-old Foreign Minister for the two-year period 2020-2022, supported by the pro-Western opposition, had surprisingly won the first round with 42.51% of the votes, gathering almost 124 thousand more votes than Pellegrini, who placed second with 37% as an expression of the left-wing nationalism of the current government. But according to some analysts this advantage of 5.5 basis points may not be enough to beat the 48-year-old Pellegrini, who was prime minister between 2018 and 2020, in the
runoff. The majority of voters who supported the candidates defeated in the first round are more likely to support Pellegrini than Korcok, one political scientist argued. The polls, open from 7am local and Italian time, close at 10pm and significant results are expected around midnight.
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