Slovak Prime Minister Quits His Party Ahead of Snap Election

Daniel Hornak
·2 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- Slovakia’s caretaker prime minister, Eduard Heger, quit his party and signaled he’ll join another one ahead of early elections planned for September that were triggered by his previous cabinet’s collapse.

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Heger is expected to announce he’ll join a small center-right party on Tuesday with the goal of consolidating that side of the euro area country’s political spectrum before the vote. While in power, he struggled to wrangle a motley coalition of center-right parties in a cabinet that suffered from constant bickering over issues ranging from Covid-19 measures, energy subsidies and consolidating the budget.

“I have my own vision of politics,” he wrote on his Facebook page Monday. “I know that if I want to fulfill it, I have to go my own way.”

Heger said his main goal is to keep the country of 5.4 million on a democratic and pro-European path, even as former three-time Prime Minister Robert Fico, who was forced to step down in 2018 in the aftermath of the murder of a journalist investigating corruption, gains in opinion polls.

Fico’s Smer party has lurched from its moderate Social Democratic roots to embrace pro-Russian, euroskeptic rhetoric, including arguments for the NATO member to stop supplying neighboring Ukraine with weapons. The former premier has also suggested he could create a ruling coalition with a far-right party that in the past expressed sympathy with Slovakia’s World War II-era Fascist regime.

Heger’s political prospects have dimmed since he became prime minister in 2021. Opinion polls before he quit his party showed about a fifth of voters would prefer Heger to lead a new center-right grouping, but only 4% said they’d vote for it.

He had been hinting at leaving the Ordinary People party for several months over differences in values with Chairman Igor Matovic. Several members of the current caretaker government earlier said that Heger should remain in his role as prime minister until the elections, even if he exited the party.

His government collapsed in a December vote of no confidence after the coalition failed to agree on measures to curb the impact of the European cost-of-living crisis.

(Updated with context throughout.)

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