The government coalition managed to manoeuvre out of its sticky situation as it has decided to block the vote on the Attorney General set for tomorrow. They will block the vote by calling on their MPs to collect their ballot papers, but not post them in the actual vote. This then means that nobody can get a simple majority of present MPs in parliament.
The news comes following the Coalition Council meeting today, which was preceded by speculations about the demission of PM Iveta Radicova, should Dobroslav Trnka have been voted in as Attorney General again through the blind ballot.
Now the government will prepare the necessary legislation to make most voting in parliament public, especially when concerning important nominations, so that nobody can then hide behind the ballot screen.
At the press conference following the meeting, all the coalition leaders expressed their full backing for Prime Minister Iveta Radicova. They said the coalition had agreed on its structure in the beginning, inclusive of Radicova as PM, and that no other alternative existed. This was in response to speculations that the coalition could maybe restructure if PM Radicova were to step down.
Head of SaS Richard Sulik justified their reasoning for changing the system, saying that the people who voted for them had every entitlement to know how their elected MPs were voting in parliament. He also noted how voting was public when it concerned big money deals, and so it should be also for crucial issues like voting in the Attorney General.
So the vote tomorrow should fail once again, unless the 6 ‘cowardly traitors’ (as Sulik referred to them), openly go against the government and vote in favour of current AG Trnka anyway. Failing that, the next round of the vote should take place at the beginning of February, possibly even after the current term of the Attorney General has lapsed.
When asked whether they would put forward the same candidate as now, Jozef Centes, the parties unanimously agreed that this would be the case.
The names of the 6 traitors are still not know, but this is not the primary concern of the coalition, as they now have to rebuild their mutual trust and adopt the necessary legislation to open up the transparency of voting in the Attorney General next year.
[…] Constitutional Court judged that coalition MPs had acted illegally when they collected their ballot papers for a secret vote on 2 December but then did not cast them. The coalition blocked the Attorney General vote in this […]