Robert Fico blamed his coalition partners for the crisis.
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico gave his coalition partners a strict March deadline to resolve their current impasse, stressing the possibility of snap elections if the country’s parliament remains in crisis.
“I told them … deal with it, or we are going to hell,” Fico told a political discussion show on Slovak network TA3 on Sunday.
“If the Slovak National Party (SNS) and Hlas (Voice) don’t secure the functioning of the parliament … the only solution for this country will be snap parliamentary elections,” said Fico.
“Why should I, as the leader of a stable coalition party, pay the price for the coalition’s inability to enforce laws in parliament?” he added.
Fico said that an alternative to the snap elections would be a reshuffle of the number of MPs set by the coalition agreement, a scenario neither of the two coalition partners are fond of.
The coalition crisis was sparked by the departure of three SNS MPs who rebelled and quit their caucus in October over internal disputes — and continue to withhold support for the coalition until it meets their demands.
As a result, Fico’s government has been working with a razor-thin majority of 76 out of 150 and faced trouble passing laws through the chamber. Fico conceded in November that snap elections may be inevitable.
The crisis has also highlighted the tense relations between Fico and Slovakia’s President Peter Pellegrini, an increasingly vocal critic of the PM.
Four other MPs from the Hlas party began to rebel against certain proposals in December over, among other matters, the government’s ties with Russia. Over Christmas, Fico paid a surprise visit to Moscow where he met Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Michal Šimečka, the leader of liberal Progressive Slovakia party, said that Fico’s visit to Moscow was a maneuver to conceal his own problems in the coalition.
“Why did gas became such a hot topic, why is prime minister flying to Moscow, it’s to conceal his own problems — the high prices, the instability of the coalition. Because he did not negotiate anything, not even one cubic meter of gas,” said Šimečka.
Fico said on Thursday in Brussels that Slovakia will introduce harsh reciprocal measures against Kyiv, after it had refused to prolong agreement that allowed Russian state energy giant Gazprom to ship supplies to the EU via pipelines running across Ukraine.
