Surprise win for hardliner in Slovakia election

Slovakia’s former authoritarian prime minister edged out the expected favourite in the presidential election and advanced to a second round against a former political ally, according to preliminary results released today.

Vladimir Meciar, whose rule was criticised by Western leaders for its lack of democracy and rule of law, won 32.7% of the vote in yesterday’s election, said Ladislav Jaca, a central election commission official. All of the votes had been counted, Jaca said.

Ivan Gasparovic, who left Meciar’s Movement for a Democratic Slovakia in 2002 to form his own party, was second with about 22.3% of the vote.

The candidate who had topped most polls, foreign minister Eduard Kukan, trailed in third place with 22.1%.

Meciar and Gasparovic will advance to the April 17 run-off if the results are certified later today. The role of president is largely ceremonial.

The turnout in yesterday’s vote was 47%, far below expectations, the state-run news agency TASR reported.

Also yesterday, a referendum asking for parliamentary elections to be held two years early failed to reached the required turnout of 50%, Jaca said. The referendum was initiated by the opposition and labour unions who say the government’s economic reforms have left poor Slovaks even worse off.

The winner of the presidential runoff vote will help guide Slovakia in its first years in Nato and the European Union. Slovakia joined the Nato alliance earlier this week, and becomes an EU member on May 1.

Yesterday’s result is bound to attract attention from Slovakia’s new allies.

While Meciar was in power, Slovakia failed to qualify for joining Nato along with its neighbours in 1999, and it was unable to start negotiations with the EU for membership, since it at the time did not fulfill the political nor economic criteria.

Meciar, an ex-boxer and night-school law graduate, took the republic of 5.4 million people to nationhood in 1993, after it and the Czech Republic gave up on Czechoslovakia and went their own ways.

But his rule was clouded by allegations of authoritarianism, corruption and a lack of scruples in dealing with his opponents.

By the time he was voted out of office in 1998, Slovakia was shunned by the US and Western Europe, and both his popularity and that of his right-leaning Movement for a Democratic Slovakia faded.

In 1999, he ran for the presidency in Slovakia’s first direct elections, but lost in a runoff to President Rudolf Schuster, who is running for re-election but without the support of any political party. Schuster’s popularity has fallen since he became president five years ago.

Meciar has acknowledged mistakes during his rule, but said the fledgling country needed a stern leader.

“Dictatorship is not part of my personality,” but a certain amount of authoritarianism was needed in the first days of the young Slovak republic, he said.