Pro-Russia candidate Peter Pellegrini has won Slovakia’s presidential election, consolidating Prime Minister Robert Fico’s leftist government.
Election results on Saturday from 99.66 percent of voting districts showed Pellegrini bagged 53.26 percent of the votes, versus 46.73 percent for pro-Western opposition candidate Ivan Korcok.
The 48-year-old president-elect said his victory meant Fico’s government would have support for its programs, and would not face an “opposition, opportunistic power center” in reference to outgoing liberal president Zuzana Caputova.
“I will be a president who will support the government in its efforts for improving people’s lives,” Pellegrini said at his campaign headquarters. “I will do everything for Slovakia to forever remain on the side of peace and not the side of war.”
Slovak presidents do not have many executive powers, but can veto laws or challenge them in the constitutional court.
The country held the first round of voting last month, however, neither of the candidates won the minimum 50 percent. Korcok won the first round after receiving 42.5 percent of the votes, while Pellegrini finished second with 37 percent.
Pellegrini has had a long-time alliance with Fico. The current speaker of parliament later split from Fico to set up his own party, Hlas (Voice), more centrist and liberal than Fico’s populist-leftist SMER-SSD, but formed a government with Fico and the nationalist SNS last October.
Pellegrini, seen as more moderate than Fico, said his victory would not mean a rush to drastically change foreign policy, stressing that he will continue to be a strong member of the EU and NATO.
Prior to the vote, Pellegrini had said the European Union and NATO were “divided between those who are in favor of the continuation of the war [between Russia and Ukraine] at all costs, and those who demand the start of peace negotiations, and I belong to the latter.”
He has portrayed Korcok as a warmonger for his support for arming Ukraine and said he could take Slovak troops into the war, a charge Korcok denied.
Fico’s coalition government has halted Slovakia’s official shipments of weapons for Ukraine.
He has spoken about what he called Western influence in Ukraine’s war which only led to Slavic nations killing each other, vowed not to send “a single round of ammunition” to Kiev and called for better relations with Russia.
