Note: Thanks to The Monkey Cage for allowing me to reprint the posting below.  I’ve added several graphs that might help to clarify the narrative. One month after its June 12 elections, Slovakia has a new government. On Friday of last week Iveta Radicova of the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union became the prime minister [...]

Apologies to readers for the long absence thanks, for a change, to a real vacation.  As nice as it was to go away it’s nice to be back.  And there is no nicer way to return to blogging life than to do so with a review of the 2010 Slovak Elections in The Monkey Cage, [...]

I have been traveling and working on other projects and so have not had time to post a coherent post-election review, and I may not have time to do that until tomorrow, so in the meantime I will attach here a record of interview I did with the ever-capable Michaela Stankova of the Slovak Spectator.  [...]

With all but 2 precincts reporting, the gap has widened slightly to give an additional seat to SDKU at the expense of Smer, so a potential SDKU-led coalition would have an 8 seat (i.e. 4 defection) margin.  Other governments have worked with less. I’m off to bed unless the final precincts come in in the [...]

It may be possible finally to call the final parliamentary distribution.  Smer has been dropping but at a relatively slow level and with the most recent result it has dropped to 35.4 which by my calculation means 63 seats in parliament.  Add this to SNS’s 9 (about the fewest it is possible to get) and [...]

With  56.5% of the vote counted, Smer shows a gently declining trend while SDKU, SaS, and Most-Hid show gently increasing trends. If these trends continue, then those three parties plus KDH should have enough seats to form a government.  Even if the trends do not continue and the lines merely flatten out, the current ratio [...]

Just a quick post here–since as Slovakia’s election nears I want to move away from essays and toward updates.  Even as I lack the ability even to guess how parties will actually fare in the election, the news causes me to think about what happens after the votes are in and what kind of government [...]

Editor’s note:  For the first time on this blog I welcome a guest blogger, and there is no better way to start than with Sean Hanley of University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, Centre for the Study of Central Europe.  It is Sean’s Blog, http://drseansdiary.blogspot.com/that made me realize how useful blogs [...]

Everything you never wanted to know about politics in Slovakia and were therefore afraid to ask (lest I’d tell you).  I’ve finally had a chance to annotate an absurdly long and detailed presentation on Slovakia’s politics which derived in large part from the exercises I’ve been conducting on this blog (and past efforts).  The questions, [...]

With 8 parties potentially entering Slovakia’s parliament there are 255 different coalition possibilities.  Fortunately, not withstanding Bismark’s aphorism that “Politics is the art of the possible,” there are quite a few coalition possibilities that we can exclude and in the end we can narrow down the possibilities to a relatively small number.  In the paragraphs [...]