Although the anti-Gorilla protests took a bit of a beating as disputes broke out among the organisers and quasi-organisers, the core group are not letting up on the pressure and this Friday will target the party headquarters of Robert Fico’s Smer-SD party and Mikulas Dzurinda’s SDKU party in Bratislava.
This Friday’s march will start at 4pm on Hviezdoslavovo Square, from where the protesters will head to the borough of Ruzinov to demonstrate outside the Smer-SD and SDKU party offices, as both parties are prime suspects in the Gorilla corruption affair as having allegedly been in cahoots with financial group Penta.
In addition to the regular protest marches, the organisers are now starting to utilise legal means at their disposal, filing a criminal complaint against former head of the Anti-Corruption Office, Tibor Gašpar, who gave the order in 2008 to shred materials linked to the Gorilla affair. The organisational team is charging him with thwarting the investigation into serious corruption allegations.
The Gorilla protesters are also calling on the heads of all major political parties to give them a pre-election promise by this Friday that they will meet the four key demands of the protesters should they make it into parliament. One of the main organisers, Peter Pcolinsky, said “Let them show whether they are sincere about it or not”.
The demands include cancelling criminal immunity for MPs, a change to the Referendum Act that would make the results valid with a simple majority of votes, and an end to political nominations in supervisory bodies and in companies where the state owns shares.