Slovaks vote in EU membership referendum

Slovak voters were expected to reaffirm their young nation’s top foreign policy goal, membership of the European Union, in a two-day referendum beginning today.

President Rudolf Schuster appealed to the formerly communist country of 5.4 million people to embrace the idea of joining the EU, calling it the only road to prosperity and a solid future.

Although it is among the fastest-growing EU candidate nations, Slovakia still lags far behind the European mainstream. The average monthly salary was just €333 last year.

“You older ones will vote for the future of your children, you younger ones for yourselves,” Schuster said in a televised address earlier this week.

Polls were to open at 2pm (1pm Irish time) and were to close at 10pm (9pm Irish time), with voting to resume tomorrow. Official results were expected on Sunday.

About 4.2 million Slovaks are eligible to vote.

The vote is mainly symbolic. Slovakia has already signed the treaty to join the European Union along with nine other candidates in May 2004, but the pact must be ratified by the Slovak parliament.

Some candidate countries, Slovakia among them, have added a referendum to the process. It is uncertain whether the results of the vote would be binding – but in any case, MPs will ratify the accession, not the voters themselves.

Support for EU membership runs high in Slovakia, which shook off communism in 1989 and split peacefully from what used to be Czechoslovakia a decade ago.

All parties in the current parliament favour joining the bloc, and recent surveys suggest more than three in four Slovaks feel the same.

Slovakia gained its independence in 1993, after the split of former Czechoslovakia into two independent states.

Unlike other countries which immediately started out on a democratic path after the fall of communism, young Slovakia took a detour under the authoritarian rule of former Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar. He ruled the country until 1998.

During that period, the country was isolated by the West, which said Meciar’s rule lacked commitment to democracy and the rule of law. Because of that, Slovakia was invited to start accession negotiations with the EU a few years after its neighbours, and had to speed the pace of reforms to catch up.

It managed to do so, Schuster noted this week, telling his people: “I believe this fact fills you with as much pride as it does me.”

Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda, who took office in 1998, has attracted foreign investment by overseeing the restructuring of the troubled banking sector, ending an era of cronyism, and selling off major state-run companies.