Slovaks vote on joining the EU

Slovaks voted today on whether to join the European Union in a two-day referendum which began a day earlier.

The country’s leaders and all the major parties have for months appealed to the formerly communist country of 5.4 million people to embrace the idea of joining the EU, describing it as the country’s surest path to future prosperity.

Although it is among the fastest-growing EU candidate nations, Slovakia still lags far behind the European mainstream. The average monthly salary was just €328 last year.

“I am glad that I have lived to this moment and that we can finally vote on something that we long could not have imagined,” President Rudolf Schuster said yesterday after casting his ballot in his home town of Kosice, in eastern Slovakia.

Mr Schuster, a former ranking official of the communist party, became the country’s first president to be directly elected by voters in 1999.

About 5,100 polling stations across Slovakia opened at 7am local time (6am Irish time) today and are to close at 2pm local time (1pm Irish time). Official results were expected tomorrow.

A source close to the government said voter turnout by the end of Friday was 25% to 30%. He did not elaborate.

So far, four candidate nations – Malta, Hungary, Slovenia and Lithuania – have held referendums approving entry into the European Union. The Czech Republic and Poland hold referendums next month.

Despite the generally pro-EU mood around the country, analysts warned that turnout might not reach the required threshold of 50% needed for the result to be valid. About 4.2 million Slovaks are eligible to vote.

The referendum 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, parliament members will ratify the accession, not 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.